 I hit the button! I made us go live! Blair where'd you go? Is there a Sadie in the house? Sadie dropped her treat. Oh poor Sadie. I had to get it for her. Oh you always have to be there for our pets and our loved ones. What am I gonna let her get down and pick it up herself? That's ridiculous. Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness. Somebody today was telling me how much they want a doge coin and I was like well I'd rather have a Korgi coin. Korgi coin. Doge's. We're live everyone. This is the This Week in Science podcast broadcast. What? What do you talk about? I have no idea what the kids are talking about today. You're talking about dogs? Or am I talking about some food in the house? Can we just can we pretend cryptocurrency doesn't exist? For the next couple of hours just we're talking about science. We're not talking about those things. All right we're skipping it and moving in to the show. You ready for the show? Let's do the show. We're gonna start the show right now. Oh yeah I'm gonna hit this button and then that button and then the other button and then I'm gonna start the show in a little bit of three two this is twist. This week in science episode number 823 recorded on Wednesday May 5th 2021 Cinco de Mayo Science Salsa. It's very tasty. Hi everyone I'm Dr. Kiki and tonight on the show we are going to fill your head with regeneration, simulation and invisibility but first. Disclaimer disclaimer disclaimer world governments continue to reflect thoughtfully over the past year's pandemic waiting patiently to reopen until such a time as it is safe for the general public to return like Florida did before leading the nation in COVID cases like India did before leading the world in COVID cases. How did the virus overwhelm hospital capacity? Who knows? It was a novel virus despite dire warnings from scientists who study such things. It was pretty obvious that it was safe because why bother with facts. Even now I'm talking about it in the past tense despite there being more new cases in the world in the past week than any other time and peak deaths will naturally follow although actually right before we got to the show and we were at peak deaths globally. So statistically we are at the worst point in the pandemic's history but it's not history because it's still happening now but why bother with facts? Let's just reopen everything. Meanwhile efforts are underway do we imagine the future of energy production? Our current system was imagined to exist since a hundred years ago since then we've learned that reliance on fossil fuels while fantastic at first is bad for human health. It's bad for land, air and water quality, turning them toxic which is about as far from qualities you can get and of course it's also bad for the stability of the climate. We've known all of this for nearly 100 years thanks to scientists who have been pointing out the dangers all along the way but still we fail to make any significant changes to our behavior because again why bother with facts? Facts are persistent and pesky things though and while we may not wish to bother with them time will come when they don't bother with us either because none of the facts we ignore now will matter when we have all sorts of new facts to deal with all sorts of new questions like which cities will be abandoned first when sea levels rise above their sewer systems or their suburbs? Which for what reasons did the superstorms get started? Why are there so many species of animal going extinct so fast? Who knew that minor food web collapse in the ocean could lower the planet's oxygen level? Someday soon, sooner than you think even, the world won't care about warning signs anymore because it will be too late. But it isn't too late it's not too late yet. There's still time. In fact you are just in time for another episode of This Week in Science coming up next. 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're back. We do this every week and it's super fun. We get to bring the science. It seems that way as in it seems it's every week or it seems to be fun? It seems like it's every week and I think it's fun but I don't know if it actually is. I think it is. Okay good. Yeah and everyone joining us tonight thank you for joining us for this episode. I have brought some stories for all of you about viral DNA. I've got some simulated impacts and consciousness. What did you bring Justin? Consciousness. I've got invisibility fences, the plurality of posteriors, holographic histopathology just because it's fun to say, and three ways to monetize female fertility today. Great. All right Blair what's in the animal quarter? Justin brought those multiple posteriors. I know exactly what's that story is. I'm very excited to hear about it. I brought Jurassic Garden. I brought Regenerating Sea Squirts and I also brought teeny tiny stabby shrimp. Little teeny tiny ones. Yeah. Little teeny tiny stabby things. Little babies. Baby stabby things. Yeah well as we jump into stabbing your heart with science on the show tonight I would like to remind everyone that if you have not yet subscribed hit that subscribe button wherever you are and get twists every single week. We are found on just about every podcast platform out there and we are on YouTube, Facebook and Twitch. Our website is twist.org. Okay it's time for the science. Hot off the steamy presses of the internets. Yeah I'm just making up all sorts of songs now. Now researchers at Flinders. Flinders not Flanders not Flanders. Flanders University are Yeah well they're looking at plants as their neighbors and the neighbors that plants live very very closely with in their new paper that just came out entitled Intracellular Bacteria in Plants. Illucidation of Abundant and Diverse Cytoplasmic Bacteria in Healthy Plant Cells using in vitro cell and callous cultures. What? What? Wait. That's just the title? Yes. It feels longer than the last paper I wrote. Intracellular bacteria in plants. Okay it's well known bacteria can be pathogens to plants. They can get kind of at the borders of cells. They can kill cells. They can take over plants with their with the microbes of funguses, viruses, bacteria. All these things can get in there but they don't live happily in the cells in the plants right? Well this paper did a bunch of staining and electron microscopy to determine that they were finding abundant and diverse diverse cytoplasmic bacteria cytoplasm that is the body living in the bodies of the cells in healthy plants not diseased pathogenic plants we're talking about healthy healthy plants play host to all sorts of bacteria and they found that they had proteobacteria succeeded by firmacutes, actinobacteria, bacteriodoidies, planktomycetes and 20 other phyla and other candidate phyla they were able to do genetic uh genetic tests to and on RNA tests to be able to determine the species that were present and to contrast them to the actual plant DNA that was present as well and they don't think this is from contamination. They think that these are bacteria living in the cells of plants inside the cells. Okay many many questions. Yes so many many questions. One why has this never been this is real this is true how come nobody's ever noticed this before ever and wouldn't they they're they're claiming that this isn't cross contamination of some sort uh from the sequencing like I just haven't things been sequenced before think so like why does like what is the how oh gosh what is the how these are the question yeah so the this is this research has been worked on for over a decade by uh the involved authors and uh this is uh the authors from Flinders University and also from um Australia and they employed a number of techniques to show that there were basically bacteria around the cytoplasm of cells however the bacteria they a lot of times they're not just all over the cytoplasm it appears as though they like to hang out near the the cellular membrane. That's where all the action is. That's where the yeah where the action is but so they are more or less like sectioned they're they like they like their their bacteria section but many different methods of showing that they were abundant and diverse the question now is can this be replicated uh on twitter I was informed by a researcher from Canada Brian Haidt that there are a number of insects it's where it's very common for bacteria to exist in the cells of insects so we have booknara and Wolbachia they're intracellular endosymbiotes and there are a lot of symbiotes that are out there and so finding this in plants as well could potentially open a lot of doors to research in terms of health of plants how can you get certain plants to grow better the researchers for this particular study they're particularly interested in papaya and helping to uh to make the growth and and development of papaya stronger and stronger faster better um yeah but it is a it's a whole thing and this then we start asking these questions about these endosymbiotes at what point do they go away from being separate bacteria and when do they turn into mitochondria or other cellular organelles when does that line cross yeah yeah so if this holds and no reason to think it wouldn't yeah that means we need to look at every kind of because this isn't in any textbook the relationship between I mean the relationship between a bacteria and a plant in the roots taking up nutrition maybe on the leaves there's a symbiotic relationship there on the outside of the plant internal to the plant relationship is not in any textbook is not a thing that's understood or taken into account for anything plant related which is a whole bunch of biotech and a whole bunch of textile and food agriculture everything industries that take uh that's it's huge not to have noticed that's why I'm also as much as I have no reason to doubt also I'm a little suspicious there's been a lot of looking at this right this is not a thing that nobody plants have been under the microscope in a plant before like that's not a thing but see on the other side I'm thinking there's bacteria everywhere it's just everywhere it's if you think it's not somewhere it turns out it's there it's it's kind of you know it's it's it's a very cool new kind of thing to see but it definitely yes there is definitely part of me that's like yeah of course which means of course step one and looking at looking at plants under electron microscope or in sequencing is you just got to ignore all the bacteria because it's everywhere it gets into every it contaminates everything just ignore it so what are the interesting aspects of this study is they tried they were like okay we see these bacteria in the cell in in the plant cells well let's try and grow the bacteria on their own and they could not get the bacteria from the plant cells to culture on their own they only grew in combination with the plant cells which is another interesting very interesting point which points to them having some energetic or nutrient requirement that it that comes from the plants so but maybe I missed it because I'm still getting enough coffee to me to be conscious this morning did they identify any of the bacteria as belonging to certain families or something yes like what is several specific families yeah okay but they have they look at close enough to see that it's like close to but it's different enough because it's been sequestered away for million or 20 million or 50 million years living not that sequestered yeah or just yanked in they're in the family they have the genes that that particular family of bacteria have genus yes and yeah so they're related very closely it's a species within a genus within but these might not be these are the then maybe not captured and then just held captive and they're up against the cell while like they're way out but then if they get out they don't survive but then they're are they doing there they must be specifically oh wow what are they doing this is a great story we need to follow up they need to do more research I would like to know more I want to know more about bacteria living in inside of cells inside of things yeah endosim cellular endosymbionts tell me a story Justin oh okay uh let's see have you ever had wood and thought gosh I wish nobody could see my wood right now well no never have okay well uh some people have uh transparent wood was actually developed by researchers at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden as a new construction material about five years ago uh trying to figure out like don't we have see we have glass why would you need to invent something else see through uh but wood has some characteristics that glass doesn't have one it's uh it doesn't shatter uh it might be more resistant to impact than glass that sort of thing uh but they created wood that you could actually let natural light through uh he even stored thermal energy to an extent so the key to making wood into a transparent composite material was to strip out the like leganin legman I don't know if I'm pronouncing right legman legman legman which is the major light absorbing component in the wood this was first accomplished actually even decades before the Swedish group got involved by a Russian scientist uh Siegfried Fink who is using this technique just to study wood structure he just wanted to pull it out but the that that method left it pretty weak so you take out all the things you end up with all these empty pores in the wood uh it's nice and see through you can sort of see the structure but then as a material it becomes very very weak so early versions of the Swedish composite they used plastic polymers that they would sort of saturate back into the wood to fill it now the researchers have successfully tested more eco-friendly alternative uh limining uh acrylate which is uh basically it's the compound that a compound that you would find in citrus peels uh basically they found that they can infill with that it'll dry clear and then you can see through wood so what makes it wood and not just uh a plant-based product that is see-through because that's what wood is except for the see-through part okay because uh straws plastic cups things like this are currently being made out of corn potato and other plant-based starches so so no plastic cup has ever been made out of corn that's the thing so there are compostable plant-based clear yes plastic cups but then it's plastic how is your plastic still it's still plastic it's a but that plastic was a fossil uh derived no oh no you can have soy derived you can have potato you can have corn yeah it just the the different type of starch that's used in the for the production is going to have different effects properties but um yeah so say the decompostable or compostable uh cups or plates they're they're less hardy of a plastic I guess but that kind of goes in line with what Justin's saying about the wood being less hardy also initially so then they were using plastics but they wanted to find something more sustainable so they've used this citrus peel oil compound that they're infusing with now and they're using this for structural uh the construction grade so this isn't just let's see if we can make this see through uh but they're actually doing it to use as building materials in the construction of homes in places where they would like to have light come through you could have light coming through a wall you could have uh light that's coming through uh ceiling rafters this sort of thing um and they are at 90 percent uh transparency uh with a what they're calling a uh low haze rate of 30 percent which I don't know how you have 90 percent transparency and 30 percent haze but it's a little foggy a little foggy but that's still fine yeah uh some of the things also it's they they said there's some pretty interesting and uh beautiful even uh light effects that are that are coming from this I don't know it's sort of it's like you could where would you put yeah but where would you use this I would my intro there I was uh for the naming of the show was calling it like maybe see-through fences so you want to have you want to have your fence the dog doesn't get out but you know maybe there if you have all these see-through fences it sort of looks like a big much more open space much more open area in a yard if you have if you have the the the things that you brought up the idea of having a window that's not quite a window so instead of a uh you know uh instead of a skylight that has glass in it or is made of plastic that can break potentially during a hailstorm or when a tree limb lands on it you have something that's more structurally sound and maybe you can have a much larger area of the roof actually is sunroof. Yeah and I was thinking about the kind of the haziness of it means that you'd still have some privacy but you could have um passive lighting passive heating excuse me is what I meant to say um yeah so you could if you had if you had a wall that was made out of this stuff then you could save a lot of money on heat potentially it's facing in the right direction yeah as opposed to having the double glazed windows or triple glazed windows depending on where you are yeah you could let that light through some of that heat through and and some of the some of the versions of this I've apparently it's very see-through now as you get to greater and greater thicknesses uh it becomes more opaque but some of it is you could read uh you could put down on top of a piece of print and read through it just fine and if you want to check uh the internet uh there's lots of uh youtube videos of people doing this at home uh I'm pretty sure they're all fake except for the ones that fail there's a bunch that fail that you can be pretty confident they were really trying but I think this is I think it could be a really great idea depending on it you've got right now the cost of wood is increasing in the United States so um wood as a resource you know maybe we want this maybe we don't but if it is more sustainable and has less of an ecological impact then say glass production if it is better for house heating and cooling I mean there are a lot of analyses that potentially still need to be made for cost benefit analysis but regardless instead of a glass brick you can have transparent wood which that sounds really fascinating yeah I don't know that glass glass is glass is one of those things that they tell you you shouldn't even bother recycling because it's so easy to manufacture and so it's like more expensive and it takes more energy to recycle glass than it does to to make it or something break it and turn it back into sand something like this yeah uh but but uh yeah maybe there is like maybe there's places where this could be really useful one of the interesting things that I started that up too is uh maybe there can be an application if it could be clear enough to use it in solar panels solar panel glass is already pretty strong but even if you were reducing some of the capabilities of a solar panel having a solar panel that has uh structurally this is as strong as a plywood versus a glass might be a benefit in some areas where they're going to be involved in some increment hailstorms or you know sometimes all right Blair tell us about your story what do you have coming up yes well you know I I just rewatched Jurassic Park recently and it was very fun to rewatch but um obviously it could never happen for a bunch of reasons but what might happen is Jurassic Garden so what oh uh New York University has successfully germinated a 2000 year old seed wow so it's a previously extinct date palm variety it lived over 2000 years ago and it was recovered from an archaeological site this seed through radiocarbon dating they were able to to discern that it was from about fourth century BCE to second century CE so around that 2000 year mark they successfully germinated and yielded viable new plants from this extremely old seed founded an archaeological site so this is this is the first time that researchers have sequenced genomes of plants from ancient germinated seeds so not only did they germinate and raise these plants that are extinct but then they sequenced the genome so they were able to figure out where they fit and kind of saw how um there was some hybridization that happened from the results of the roman empire moving into the Mediterranean and bringing plants with them and all sorts of cool stuff they figured out from the genome wow but yeah they they germinated raised and then and then processed the genome for this 2000 year old date palm there was minimal dna damage it was a super dry environment in this case probably helped it because it was from this dry environment to begin with but uh this is the latest breakthrough in quote unquote resurrection genomics resurrecting a 2000 year old plant is no mean feat i mean there is an ongoing experiment that's that uh people have been talking about for the last couple of weeks uh i'm forgetting where exactly it's located which is probably a good thing because nobody go and try and dig up the remaining seeds that are in this experiment but over a hundred years ago a researcher decided that we should find out how long seeds can last and this researcher buried a whole bunch of jars of seeds and every 20 years he went and dug them up and then he died or finished working and passed it on to another researcher and so now there's a whole new generation of researchers who are are digging these seeds up and they were able to get seeds to germinate that were over a hundred years old from one of from the latest jar that was dug up but the question is you know what are the conditions that are necessary to maintain seeds and their longevity like you said to make sure there's no dna damage um yeah and and it might be different for different plants depending on where they're from too right yeah so is there something special about this date palm ancestor that made it able because it maybe started out in a dry environment and it was able to desiccate and it was in a dry environment while it was hidden for 2000 years from humanity yeah yeah yeah and i i love this picture that you shared because it has the the kind of the fence around it and a and a placard which makes sense because if you're in the middle of the Mediterranean and um you just see a date palm it's nothing special maybe you walk up to it and pull a date off or or you sit in the shade and eat your lunch but in this case it is a very valuable tree so needs to be clearly labeled and delineated very much so but wow can you imagine yeah could you imagine a whole bunch of plants like this being brought back in a garden seems like it could be possible we just need the seeds yeah just need the seeds go find them archaeologists go get them i want to see them well in a list of other things that researchers went to find it was a recent finding in virus dna that has researchers scratching their heads actually this finding goes back until the late 70s researchers discovered one kind of virus called s-2l an unassuming name to this virus which infects cyanobacteria but they found that it incorporated into its dna a strange amino acid it this amino acid is called diamino purine otherwise known as z dna and it is a really strange form of adenine it's basically the adenine has an extra nitrogen attached to it and that extra nitrogen makes a stronger hydrogen bond with thymidine where adenine normally bonds and so it makes it a much tighter bond in that base pair relationship now they just were like okay that's this weird amino acid and they didn't think they'd find it anywhere else but but lo and behold some researchers in china decided that they were going to look into this a little bit more and they have found 60 other species of back of viruses that use this diamino purine this z dna which is an alternative form of dna basically and they're kind of like scratching their heads like wait a minute okay why would you do this well because these viruses infect bacteria they get into the bacterial cells and they want to cut up the bacterial dna so they can insert their virus dna into the mix or use the bacterial dna to whatever nefarious purposes the virus has bacteria want to defend themselves so bacteria figured out that they should block certain sequences certain patterns of dna from viruses the viruses that are attacking them pattern recognition nope you're not going to cut my dna i recognize you with your rna or your adenine your normal dna well viruses got tricky and they decided they were going to be harder to detect so they made a new form of adenine diamino purine the bacteria don't respond to it the bacteria don't notice the virus coming in to cut their dna and the virus virus is able to get around their defenses so this is a chemical adaptation to this predator-prey relationship between viruses and bacteria that has led to an alternative form of dna here on earth in lots of viruses not even aliens but here on our own planet kind of cool yeah yeah and researchers are kind of thinking about this and apparently according to ars technica there is a diamino purine forms spontaneously in space that was found on a meteorite so researchers are like oh diamino purine huh maybe that's in the mix for a long time that's interesting but additionally because of the way that the adenine thymidine base relationship is the tighter relationship it's suggested that it might be useful for use in uh with researchers who are using dna for uh for computational purposes for for computing for data storage or um or even other purposes where you want to make something that isn't recognizable by cells maybe you add z dna to the mix to make it get through sneaky z dna is so sneaky sorry that was my bad french accent making a joke no c magnifique magnifique z dna okay moving on and justin from z dna you got some branching things yeah yeah so first of all i got a quick question uh somebody i've been informed by our chat room that nyle red youtuber has done uh the recently done the uh transparent wood experiment uh effectively so apparently this is a apparently now now red is i think it's a chemist uh anyway five days ago they did uh it looks like he pulled off the transparent wood experiment on the youtube so well done looks like he's got a ton of cool experiments up there so everybody go check out nyle red on the youtube after after this show after now because you're already watching this and then you should check out nyle red after because it looks like i misspoke also congratulations uh minion pam for a third uh minion to your own podcaster congratulations yay okay so uh next story in the animal kingdom there are plenty of things worth having more than one of uh in pam's case she's added another child uh also teeth are nice to have more than one of if you're a biter or chewer uh more teeth the better eyes humans have two whereas box jellyfish how many 24 yeah they have 24 eyes who knew uh apparently they did feet people have two most land mammals have four most insects have more than that very few creatures have more than one head non-intentionally and despite the old saying that two heads are better than one animal kingdom is content with just really a single noggin situation for most creatures but what about a plurality of posteriors what benefit might we be missing by not having more than one backside there is a creature that has more than one uh it's the maritime worm that lives inside sponges uh there's one of only two known species possessing a branching body one head multiple posterior ends this is ramicillus multicowdata international research team led by university's goat engine and madrid is the first to describe the internal anatomy of this intriguing animal researchers discovered that complex body of the worm spreads extensively into the canals of their host sponges in addition they describe the anatomical details and nervous system and reproductive units it has stolons that were you did you read up on this part uh blare a little bit but i'm i'm not i'm having difficulty understanding why you'd branch at the bottom half of your body and not the top half and not the top half which is wouldn't you want right you'd want to gather nutrients not necessarily just get rid of them yeah so this is interesting physiology there's a couple things with these postures apparently that's also where the reproductive organs are mm-hmm so yeah so it's part of a budding thing right isn't it part of there well yes they create these little stolons a little which you normally i think of is like a fungus branches out and then starts another little colony off of that branch out you can have plants that can go and send out these root system that would start off a new plant and this version some of these offshoots then get their own brain and eyes and then bud off to go be reproductive okay so this is a way of reproducing replicating cloning cloning oneself i guess yeah i do believe this is this qualifies as budding i love the idea it's like okay my leg i'm just going to give my leg its own eyes let it be its own kiki go off yeah but but posterior first which is a very interesting way to go yes inside the body wall of a sponge yeah so which i kind of makes sense if you're going to grow within a sponge you know might need to take some lefts and rights and that sort of thing but yes which you know if you consider that it's inside the body wall of a sponge then it's less like go be free child it's more like go one centimeter to the left my child still inside the sponge still inside this this world this ecosystem of the sponge dream dream larger the marine marine invertebrate world is a is a strange and wild place stay tuned for more i hope this animal is used as inspiration for a sci-fi alien at some point doesn't need to be necessarily but it is interesting justin do you have did you have another story no or do i have another story for the beginning yes branching worms was your thing now it's my thing okay so we love this planet we're on right and yes we've all seen the bruce well i actually has everybody seen the bruce willis armageddon movie where everybody was like we're gonna put a nuclear bomb on the asteroid that's coming to kill everybody and destroy the planet i don't think i watched the movie but it is one of those fantasies that the planet earth is facing a common enemy probably and we all get together and do the rational thing to solve the problem in the perfect amount of time and we are able yes it's able to be done number one and number two in the time frame that we have left we're able to all work together and get it done okay well nasa jpl we're involved in a simulation exercise that took place at the seventh international academy of aeronautics planetary defense conference all right so this exercise involved the discovery of a fictitious not real asteroid called 2021 pdc and it was only used for the purposes of the exercise over a period of several days four days individuals who are involved in this simulation were moved forward through the time frame of what would hypothetically happen in the event of a massive nuclear bomb size or impact strength asteroid hitting somewhere on the planet so they discovered it and in the first day they were able to determine where it was and they determined that it had a five percent chance of impacting the earth on or around october 20th six months from the discovery date on the second day it fast forwarded them to may second which was like a week later and so they knew the orbit and the impact probability but then they got more information from the pan store stars asteroid survey found that it had been seen in images several years prior and that they were able to reduce uncertainties in the orbit and determine its impact and they determined that the from this the short amount of time before impact less than six months did not allow a credible space mission to be undertaken given the current state of technology so they realized based on okay this is going to hit us in six months and they started talking with everybody there and they tried to run through the simulation of who would we talk to how would we get a space mission going could we if we could launch something to change its trajectory could we get there in time and would that work the answer is no and so this is actually a really interesting exercise because what it means is if we were to find an asteroid similar to that to this hypothetical asteroid today no it would hit the planet somewhere and if it's in a metro area it would cause significant damage and we wouldn't be able to stop it the only act the only point forward from there would be pinpointing where it's going to land exactly and then getting out of the space exactly yeah so yeah they they they ran through it was all the top international groups like basically running through how different planetary defense space organizations and individuals could work together in the case of this kind of event and they worked well together but we just it wasn't going to save anybody so they they pushed through it and they did find in the final days of the hypothetical asteroid impact they they detected it and they were able to narrow the impact region down to the border of Germany in the Czech Republic and Austria and we're able to talk about disaster response at that point in time but it's a fascinating exercise to run through and this isn't the first time that they've done this but to be able to consider who would be involved globally you know what would we do what could we do and this is especially interesting because since we are we do have a mission out to a an asteroid currently to to try to knock it off of its track out off of its orbit around another larger body and so we will soon actually have experimental evidence as to whether or not the Armageddon scenario is something that's even feasible because at this point it's just hypothetical so i think if they have if you're gonna have them deal with evacuations you have to also deal with internet rumors that the asteroid is not real and try to convince people to actually yeah i'm gonna guess they did not deal with that i feel like this is what we've learned right is we have a global threat we have this global threat that we're currently dealing with and there is a whole secondary fight for the global threat which is convincing people there's actually a threat i think in future that should be part of the conversation too is how do you and you know i'm i'm saying this as if i'm joking but i'm also serious here that combating this information needs to be part of the process yes it was absolutely the first thing i thought of when our chat room started discussing how long it would take to evacuate a city uh there's there's 30 that's just gonna believe the earth is flat and can't be impacted right like that this just can't even possibly happen uh i think you're gonna i think it's it's a little less of an issue than what we've experienced with covid uh realistically because yeah part of the push against uh things like staying at home and distancing and the rest of it is that there are a lot of interests that want frontline workers out there earning money for their interests and so a lot of the push has been from a corporate side to get the frontline workers out there generating income for them and continuing that money flow if that money flow isn't there then i think you see a lot of the politicians were like we need the freedom to choose not to wear masks and go out there and let everybody work i think you see them just saying oh it's gonna just blow up the thing i think everybody get out of there then i think people coalesce around the issue better yeah but i i do think i think that the disinformation aspect is something that is a big issue that whether it's for health public health messaging whether it is for politics whether it is for you know getting people to understand that there is a world destroying asteroid on on path to the planet you know there these disinformation yeah but the disinformation aspect is something that needs to be addressed and if it's world destroying to you even tell anybody they even bother worth it work is cancelled for the next six months no reason and if it is one of these situations where it's like specifically going to be hitting the panhandle in florida then you know and nobody wants to leave it's okay don't fight it just don't fight it all right there you go all right everybody lord of man we are here with information this is this week in science we hope that you appreciate the information that we bring to you every week if you enjoy the show help us spread the word and share it with a friend today it's time for a very quick and positively focused covid update yay publishing in the public library of science plus one journal researchers have published their paper called how well did experts and lay people forecast the size of the covid 19 pandemic apricot how well so the researchers who were involved in uh in this research project they saw people asking experts at the beginning of the pandemic last uh march and april for their forecasting how long do you think this is gonna last is this gonna be bad you know asking all sorts of questions that epidemiologists and infectious disease researchers public health officials maybe didn't know the answers to because it was so early in the pandemic and they didn't really have all the information they needed but because this is an area that they study they made prognostications anyway and so these researchers went back and they said okay april 2020 let's ask 140 experts in the uk and 2086 lay people in the uk they had to make four quantitative predictions about the impact of covid 19 by the 31st of december 2020 so how many people were going to die how many cases did they think they were going to be they had to give a higher and low participants had to give lower and higher bounds of certainty of say like a 75 chance of their answer being true how do you think experts versus lay people performed on this task well the experts probably did better uh you know whenever it comes to prognosticating the future i feel like unless you're unless you're talking about vagus odds makers i don't give anybody better odds on being better at anything financial forecasters can do it the whoever they have doing algorithms for for sports betting those people need to get retrained and refocus on predicting when earthquakes will happen and lightning will strike like they just they're too good i'm gonna say one thing though before the big reveal here and that is that i know there are companies that had connections to biotech and experts in this field who when things shut down in early 2020 they told their staff that they would be there until 2021 at home so there is there there was a contingent of people that thought that this was going to last this long and everyone else kind of shoved it off and people didn't want to talk about it on tv because it was too depressing nobody could handle that truth in that moment but it really did seem like there was a small group of experts that really saw this coming yeah so in this sample of individuals from the united kingdom on these four questions that they asked they found that uh there was a significant difference between the the answers that the experts and the lay people actually gave and what they found in truth is that the experts were better at at prognosticating like telling the future they didn't get it exactly right every time and in fact they weren't close to right but they were better than all the non-experts wait did you say they weren't they weren't close to right right no in some of the cases so um the experts did in this particular case the average um number of deaths that they expected in the uk by december was 30 000 the actual number was 75 000 non-experts expected 25 000 so i'm gonna say pretty much no better that that graph that you were holding up it looks like they're running pretty much together right but it was it was for different different questions they had different outcomes it was interesting however that the experts were much better at the estimation of how many people out of a thousand were going to uh be infected and their number and non-experts actually way over estimated how many people were going to be infected based on the the known infection rate at the time last april uh but i just all this to say the experts were not perfect but the experts were much better than the non-experts so even when nobody knows the answers you're still going to get closer to understanding what's going on when you're listening to the experts so on blairs point of disinformation from earlier when you're talking to people on twitter who have no background in public health epidemiology infectious disease virology biology even um um maybe you should think twice and maybe you should try to find your experts especially when it comes to something like this yeah you know i i okay that's a good take my take is we just need better experts that that's maybe they were talking to the right experts i think what you need is you need experts and you need social scientists and you need those two to get together and make predictions because ultimately i think that's what was missing is that all these experts were talking about how this how covid would work unchecked and if we do everything wrong 250 000 people will die in the united states and it was way worse than that and why was it way worse than that because people kept crossing state lines and doing things that were questionable um and i think that if you talk to social scientists they probably weren't surprised yeah so they this is where you have to put the quote-unquote soft science and the hard science that's where those things are so closely related and so essential to uh specifically especially human health is you have to have these kind of this interplay because the social scientists understand are people just going to be like i'm not listening yeah and i bet you social scientists saw that coming yeah yeah i think you are absolutely right and thinking of the things that we do to mitigate the effects of covid 19 a new paper is out in science household household covid 19 risk and in-person schooling so anybody sending their kids to school right now back to school you know there's some risk right it's the same teachers are going into this situation people have been working uh with this risk for some time every time you're going into a public situation where there's mixing of more individuals than just the people in your household you're increasing risk for infection so these researchers looked at an interesting sample of data which comes from facebook which was a survey administered through facebook in partnership with carnegie melan university they had about 500 000 survey responses in the united states and they collected data over two time periods november 24th through december 23rd in january 11th to february 10th uh the first is 2020 second is 2021 um anyway yeah for the total number of responses they had about 500 000 survey responses a week their total number of responses was 2 142 887 in the 50 states states and washington dc and they reported a number of kids etc etc going to school in-person schooling increased between the two time periods which makes sense we know a lot of schools did start opening up to in-person instruction in the new year uh however the big takeaway from this study is that there is an increase to the risk of household members so kids going to in-person school can bring covid 19 home and there's an increase in risk to household members from sending kids to school this study also looked at risk mitigation factors such as mask wearing as uh placing desks further apart using you know cleaning methods all sorts of different things and they found that each mitigation method that was included reduced the risk to household members so no mitigation measures whatsoever you have a pretty reasonable risk to household members from uh kids being in school but each layer of protection increase decreases that risk substantially and they found that if seven or more mitigation members are measures are in use by the schools there is basically zero risk to people at home so schools school administrators take a look at what you're doing and see how many mitigation measures you can make work in your schools and in your classroom because the more things you do the more they add together and protect everybody in the community not just the people in the classroom i still do not understand why we are talking about this in terms of who other than the children might get infected i don't think we know what a long-term effect is uh on on children who are exposed to covid i mean we act like they're immune they're not yeah there are numbers rising in the midwest of kids getting sick right now too it's it's the new variants some of the new variants specifically are really bad for children and we are learning from uh the it thoughts have been infected on mass that there are very long-term effects that come with this uh so basically i you know they're talking about the the vaccine getting opened up for 12 to 15 year old soon right okay that's when you open the school that's when you send them once you've gotten them vaccinated the idea that we're sending kids out there on a vaccinate like who's in charge of any of this well if you it's the same it's the same idea the more non-pharmaceutical measures that you take there are non-pharmaceutical interventions that can be taken to protect people and if you are taking a number of these it's reducing the risk for the kids it's reducing the risk for everybody but i yeah i think that's the those mitigation strategies are an important part of the conversation because one of as you mentioned one of the biggest factors is how close these kids are together and how air circulation works and if you think about urban school districts those are two things that you can't really achieve if you're bringing everyone back you cannot you have 35 kids in a class are made for 15 and you have some of them 100 year old buildings that don't have proper air circulation so i think i think this is this is the real this is the importance of this study right this is exactly why we need to be having this conversation because if you're just blanket saying like justin's mentioning here kids can't get sick that's a problem and if you're blanket saying let's make it less oh we'll do this one thing we'll put a hepa filter in the corner and plug it into the wall and now we're saying yeah it's i think that's what's so important about the study you said seven metrics so it quantifying exactly how many things we have to do to make it safe for the children and their families that's what we really have to follow but then again you have to make sure that those in charge actually listen to this science which i think is the ultimate hurdle well which is also why you have to make it simple and you have to make it so it's one thing that is done to protect the children and that one thing is get them vaccinated before you do that you should every conversation about sending the kids back out there is pretty sure we should get them backs we should get children vaccinated if the vaccines are proven safe for kids in the age range because again it is a risk and we are working with vaccines that are still not actually approved but in emergency youth author use authorization and even though they appear fantastic the mRNA vaccines especially um there everybody wants to make sure that they we need to know that the risk to kids from vaccinating is not greater than the risk for covid there are lots of factors that need to be taken into consideration but we've determined that by sending them back to school you know what i'm not i mean we've we've chosen we've chosen one without the the information which is what i'm saying is just reckless i don't i don't agree with it yeah well and and ultimately not to get back on this soapbox but why is it so important that we get the kids back to school because we need a place to send children because adults are being able to come back to work yeah they want them to work this is this is a whole population that wants this is a whole cascade related to public health versus economy that it should not be a versus it's a whole separate thing but ultimately this is good information knowing that i currently live in a country that is going to put kids back to school next school year i feel like that's very clear so having this information will be extremely helpful to be as safe as we can exactly yeah this is the kind of work that needs to be done so that we can move forward even more safely and a very frightening thing yeah this is a very frightening thing that took place during this is how many people left the workforce and were on unemployment and the civilization didn't collapse in fact the stock market went up through the roof and everything's been fine people have been spending money because they have money and they're not now people have time and they're doing hobbies and enjoying life to the extent like this has been a great experiment i'm glad we got to do it now they want to end it because it's a little too well that works too well we don't need that yeah well that's it for the covid update for this week i just thought it was a little bit of good news you know we've got we've got some some information on how to live more safely more better um but yeah now i guess i want to say this is this week in science thank you for joining us tonight it's wonderful that you are here with us and if you are loving the show week in and week out maybe consider heading over to twist.org and clicking that patreon button patreon is our support community and if you are able to give ten dollars or more per month then we will thank you by name at the end of the show there are also fun rewards like t-shirts and other things that we like to send out to you and we do hope that you just want to hear twists every week you want to see us here every week just like we want to see you thank you for your support you can't do it without you all right everybody it is time for that wonderful show the part of the show that is full of the animals it's blairs animal corner with blair what you got blair oh i have weird animals from under the sea under the sea so the first um is this is a discovery from the gulf of enlotte this is researchers from telebyte university discovered a species of acidian also known as tunicates or sea squirts a marine animal commonly found in the gulf of enlotte that is capable of regenerating all of its organs even if dissected into three pieces three pieces three pieces and yes before you ask trisected you trisect this little sea squirt you get three sea squirts so not just one of them is able to completely regrow you now have three identical sea squirts because they can all regrow the two-third of them that's missing so sea squirts are one of the most evolutionarily distant to us from phylum cordata so those are animals of the dorsal cord basically it means they have an in and they have an out is what makes them kind of different so they there are chordates and there are sea squirts that are able to regenerate organs there are also ones that are capable of asexual reproduction kind of akin to the worms that we were talking about earlier in the show but this particular species that they found in the gulf of enlotte is is one that uses sexual reproduction so they don't bud they don't fit they don't go through uh vision they don't do any of this asexual reproduction that might explain why they can regrow two-thirds of their body these guys go through sexual reproduction so exactly how they still have these body mechanics is unknown so they they have um like how does it how does it work we don't know so let me let me describe a little bit more about what sea squirts are for those of you that are not aware um is that they are basically like a living pasta strainer they suck water in through their body's entry point like a mouth they the strainer filters food particles they remain in the body for digestion and the clean water exits through the exit point they only have one though and so uh they have this evolutionary connection to humans because they are chordates because they have this particular body structure that's like a very very very basic human basically um so you know we have an in and we have an out basically the same thing so they're also known for their genitive ability but again that's mostly been seen in ones that do asexual reproduction so the first thing that these researchers did is they actually um they cut them in half and they were able to replenish the removed sections of that any problem but they did have 50% of their body but then they cut them into three pieces so uh one part of the body had no nerve center one part of the body had no heart one part of the body had no digestive system but they all re grew these complex pieces and they had three identical sea squirts so this is the first time they've ever seen yeah this level of regenerative capacity among a solitary species that reproduces sexually so the the reason I think this is so interesting aside from the fact that this is kind of the most extreme version of this that we have talked about on the show that I can think of uh even beyond that sea slug that re grew its whole body from ahead the tail didn't do that just the head yeah so this is this is pretty intense that they can regrow what's missing in three different cases at the same time um but it's also important because as I mentioned these guys do share a common ancestor with us so is there a genetic key here is there something in common between how they do this and how geckos regrow their tails is there something in common between how they do this and axolotls regrow a leg this is the question that could potentially unlock something very important for us in the future but the more we can find these similarities amongst um distant relatives and their regenerative abilities the the better chance we have of of figuring something out in a more complex let's say uh animal i'm just wondering when they stopped the experiment like was three the upper limit or were they how many times did they cut let's see the tuna kits yes because would you stop it's like wow you can cut it into three and it makes three whole now let's see if it can do six let's see if it can do 26 let's see if it can do 126 let's like what's the upper limit of how many pieces you can cut this thing and it sounds barbaric but if you're getting all new ones out of it every time then you can start your own your clone army i guess yeah yeah so one of the the lead researcher says quote since the dawn of humanity humans have been fascinated by the ability to regenerate damage your missing organs regeneration is a wonderful ability that we have to a very limited extent and we would like to understand how it works in order to try and apply it within our own bodies yeah anyone snorkeling in the gulf of a lot can find this intriguing a city in who may be able to help us comprehend processes to your renewal that can help the human race so i would guess that yes the next steps for this research would be to figure out how small a piece you could cut this thing to still uh regrow the remainder of the body is there a part of this animal that when you cut it so small it can't regrow or is there something that can't be replaced what is responsible yeah which can help us figure out something about the mechanism but i think also ultimately the mechanism might not be the most important or interesting thing here i think the genetics and the the kind of the key to what what um what triggers this response i guess is is probably more valuable if you want to think about um applications in the future right because you don't want if you get a cut on your finger you don't suddenly want your finger to grow a new finger right you have the hand of hands right oh no i hate but it's an interesting question of what kind of damage results in the regeneration of an entirely new body what kind of damage results in just a limb what kind you know how does that signaling work right and i think it's just a really interesting question how little do you need how much do you how much will it go yeah and i think that also raises a really important uh reminder that there are mammals that have regeneration not of limbs but for example bears that can regrow tissue to the point where there's not even scar tissue anymore so are those similar genetic markers or origins is there something there that we can tweak to to bring that to a whole other level anyway fascinating very interesting kind of beginnings um and from sea squirts to mantis shrimp bring it um mantis shrimp they baby mantis shrimp oh little baby mantis shrimp are still deadly oh oh yes so little tiny mantis shrimp larva undergo six or seven transformations before being seen as what we consider a fully developed adult mantis shrimp and so researchers from duke university wanted to take out some high speed cameras high resolution lenses and uh uh you know why not travel to hawaii worst places to do research to investigate the developing mantis shrimp maneuvers and their research found that mantis shrimp can unleash their deadly blows as little as nine days after hatching they look nothing like a mantis shrimp yet but they can release that killer blow to get their food so um they the way they had to test this i love this so they had to try to catch mantis shrimp larva so sift through a bucket with larval crabs shrimp fish worms found their mantis shrimp larva then super glued them they're about four millimeters in size to a toothpick then place it on a custom rig to orient them within view of the camera and then kind of send food their way it took about a year to figure out how to set up this camera so that in and of itself is quite a scientific feat but they figured out how to set it up and rig it just right so that they could collect this data and um what they found was that they actually could see the region on the first portion of their appendage where it bent to store energy like a spring and then as the larva wound in the club like limb it would flick it out it would release an internal latch that held the appendage in place released that stored energy catapulted the limb into action and it looked very similar to how adult mantis shrimps use their this is the club like action um and so they could see tiny muscles in the larva's glassy bodies contracting as they bowed the exoskeleton and this is really special because you can't see that in adult mantis shrimps so they they set out to figure out when this develops when they're growing up and instead they learned more about the mechanics of a mantis shrimp club just overall which is a super cool accidental find they discovered that it's there all along yeah and they could see it because there was no thick opaque exoskeleton in the way and so the these 90 old hatchlings their limbs reached a acceleration of 22 million degrees per second squared and it's about 0.385 millimeters a second so that's actually five to ten times faster than the little larva that they were eating and it's it's very close to the adults so they had about the rotational speeds or about 16 500 degrees per second so all this to say the limb the limbs moved slower than the adults but it was still similar rotational speeds it was just slower because they're tinier um so the actual acceleration versus the rotational speed so this is a whole physics but anyway similar mechanics similar acceleration different rotational speed so slower than the adults but still extremely fast which means that they they have no problems getting their food the quick little ones they're always they're already punchy yeah and so okay so i i didn't even mention so how did they figure out exactly when this developed in the mantis shrimp so they found a female who had eggs they retrieved her they took her eggs sorry ma'am by the time they arrived at duke the eggs had already hatched but um they were able to nurture the little babies they were able to develop to 28 day old larva and they were able to kind of test their reaction time to feeding throughout all 28 days and in the nine to 15 day mark they were able to manage these intense reactions to food so they confirmed they found it just by grabbing larva in the wild and they were like all right when exactly does this happen and it does happen very very fast major shrimps gotta eat a lot major shrimps gotta smash gotta smash and eat smash to snack yep yeah thanks blare that's yeah that's dangerous david enbro special on the netflix right now talking about colors in the animal kingdom yes and there's a peacock uh mantis shrimp well different kinds of cones that yeah but that takes on a uh crab and you get to see a strike and what they're capable of and it's it's scary it's it's small i don't feel threatened if you have a very uh i don't know not six sense of humor but if you if you want to see people get hurt you can watch people who um decided to take in mantis shrimps as pets which are it's a terrible idea which is why it's kind of like okay they kind of deserve it but uh these people get mantis shrimp as pets and then they think it's fun to try to hand feed them and they get stabbed or smacked and uh often it also breaks the aquarium um so it's yeah it's it's a good reminder of why that is not a good pet is what i worked at the zoo we would have good pet bad pet conversations and i would say mantis shrimp definitely not a good pet no you get to the the researchers to have the mantis shrimps in the aquarium please please do that oh and you out there you listening to the show you not you but you all of you you sitting there listening it's like you're talking to me yes you you if you enjoy twists why don't you tell the world with a little bit of twist merchandise head over to twist out or click on our zazzle store link we've got some new items in the show in the show in the store right new mug and t-shirt full of sciencey goodness go check that out we got sciencey goodness in our store and now justin it's your turn tell me a story let's see i don't know which is the one that i had oh i think i know uh holographic histopathology holographic histopathology this is the story i selected just so i could say holographic histopathology is that the voice that you're doing a little bit a little bit uh histology for those of you who are not familiar is not the study of drunk history episodes but the study of biological tissues at the microscopic level the science behind uh that magical mythical lab or of the biopsies are all sent off to is histology tissue samples are collected from a patient they are examined for signs of disease using a process that requires this tissue sample to be stabilized sliced stained fixed to a slide so that the anatomy of the cells can be clearly visible under a microscope the process itself turnaround time for between when a sample was taken and is actually been analyzed can be days between now a high resolution imaging technique is hoping to speed up and improve the turnaround of the sample processing with the power of optical diffraction tomography research team is what yeah optical diffraction tomography which if you're not familiar uh is a myscrop uh microscopic technique where a complex scattered field light is transmitted through the sample then retrieved using off-axis holographic scattered field illuminations mapped to a four-year space on the back of a reflective index then folded into the shape of a crane basically optical origami optical origami is sort of let's just call it that and it's easier uh basically they managed to get a really good 3d image of a hundred micron thick tissue sample which is compared to normal uh normally the slides upon which they're operating to do the sampling uh to do the observations is about five microns it's very thin slices that they make to create the sort of a 2d uh slide of the tissue samples that they want to look over for pathologies this allowed them to use a hundred micron hundred micron thick uh tissue sample and get a little bit of a 3d imaging in there by the way that they were able to do this and and in some of the cases they could do this anywhere from 40 to 40 minutes to a little over an hour and a half so they also had a pretty quick turnaround on this there's still issues and stuff that you still need to work everything out but one of the sort of neat things that this would allow a lot of times these these uh the reason that you're going to have these biopsies in the in the like looked at is to see if you have a disease or to verify that this tissue looks disease let's send it in to confirm it in the lab setting the other thing that can be used for if you have very fast turnaround that has very clear looks is if you have had uh then a surgery to remove a tumor or something of this nature you also then want to make sure you've removed all of it so you might take a biopsy of surrounding tissues and want to have a quick turner where you can see this right away you still got the patient there you still got a way to get back in and attack this if you've missed but if you can get in there and look at tissue samples in real almost real time very near real time to get a good view of it you can also then uh sort of make more efficient surgeries when you're trying to remove uh diseased tissues but have pretty uh pretty big pretty big uh pretty big advance there uh once it's operational and i'll have some real real benefit in in saving lives but mostly mostly it at present is just allowing us an excuse to say holographic histopathology holographic histopathology i like it i like it i having taken histology labs uh in school i just the idea of being able to look at structures in tissue in more of a 3d image that is thrilling to be able to see how some of these ducts and and vessels how they look you know not uh not as flat because flat is not what we are but we that's what we tend to see our three-dimensional creatures yeah fascinating oh that's great don't let the screen fool you we are three-dimensional in our nature we are in our real lives you had one more story oh yeah uh i was going to give tips on how to uh monetize uh female fertility why why so well because everything everybody's got to make a buck these days you know it's the new digital economy and so apps for women uh in which they track their fertility are being utilized as marketing tools this is uh newcastle university and umu university i found romeo university i found that the most popular top fertility apps have been collecting and sharing data without user knowledge permission or consent the hundreds yeah not good not good there are ones out there that are they're probably better than others there's some that we go make a very extensive detailed claims about their sharing and not sharing all the rest of this but what they this research found is at least some of the top ones that they found through the let's see they i think they google like the top google recommendations uh for these weren't even we're we're sharing what was it 3.8 tracking uh whatever's trackers were implemented and operating before anybody had even seen a privacy document wow yeah this is dr miriam mezzazad newcastle university school computing dr trisa media from department of informatics at umu university in sweden they looked at all these privacy risks and gosh they sound saw a lot of misuse and misappropriation of what they're classifying is intimate and basically health records is how they would classify this so one of the things they also noticed was that there are there are rules and regulations that are supposed to be present in this digital environment where you have to get permissions to use things they found that those in these top these top apps were being completely ignored just completely ignored uh studies showed yes it showed also the study showed that the majority of the fertility apps were classified as health and fitness some as medical one is communication the authors argue that miscategorizing an unsecured app which contains medical records as health and fitness would enable developers to avoid potential consequences data could be could continue to be sold to their parties for various unauthorized uses such as advertising and app development they're also concerned about uh other ethical uh potentials of having this data exposed to people that the women may not want to have it exposed to especially when you're talking about they're putting everything from temperature to emotional to sexual experience activity orgasm mood uh pregnancy terminated pregnancy all of these things are ending up in this uh these apps that help and help people track if you're trying to get pregnant if you're trying not to get pregnant if you just want to sort of compare your sexual activity health uh responses from one month to the next or maybe you're just very useful maybe you're just tracking your cycles for i have to tell you i i'm a woman and i use one of these apps and it's extremely helpful because if i'm having a day where i'm like i hate everyone i think everyone hates me and also i feel tired and everything hurts i can open the app and be like oh that's why that makes sense yeah and also your significant other can also like have a very so have you checked your app lately what app what are you talking about you wouldn't dare i can't say anymore than that but i says it might be checked yeah yeah i mean i think it's maybe if you're going to be using an app like this to track yourself i mean not even just look at the permissions that you're giving and make sure that they're not going to be taking your data and using it for marketing um i have to tell you i feel like that isn't going to do that i feel like anonymized data that would be actually really nice to have um it would be cool to have an app and and to hear people say you know that this time in this cycle at this age 60 of women go through this thing or um for people that are on our app it has taken people on average 18 months to get pregnant you know like these would this would be helpful information to have if you think about that kind of use but to use that data for selling stuff or um or to target with other things it just yeah i think that's the part that gets kind of it's the commodification yeah it's every every app is there to make their the makers of the app money and um beyond just potentially paying for the app there's um you know they realize that they have this data and will potentially use it um you know i think it would be amazing to have a marketplace of apps that didn't collect all the data so that it could be taken and used for marketing and maybe you just pay for the app and you can be a part of crowdsourcing information about you know different life phases and and medical histories and anonymize the data but it's yeah it's a everything is commodified and that is the other part we are coming upon an age with the next is the operating system from Apple supposedly is going to have opt in as opposed to opt out of a lot of this stuff which which would be a gigantic improvement yeah uh but again in this case when they were looking there wasn't an opt in an opt out an inform it was just you signed up for the app so now it was an average of 3.8 trackers uh per app started right away so then it's going to be your google suggestions your amazon purchase banner add things all that kind of stuff is going to start populating and yeah uh it's yeah and i think this makes me sad because you know i i'm seeing a lot of side chatter in the chat talking about um whether this sort of thing is really necessary but i i will tell you that it has helped me understand my own bodily processes and cycles in a way that i that a calendar wouldn't have done for me that an x on a calendar would not have been the same that a that an app that follows you for you know if i have had this app for probably close to a decade it knows how my cycles work what their average uh length is when certain things happen and it it has helped me so much to be able to recognize what is going on inside of my own body in a way that that we we didn't really encourage people who have menstrual cycles to look at closely potentially in the past so i think i think there's something really beautiful to learn through this flair just keep an eye on the ads that serve to you yes on various platforms yeah they know absolutely yeah and i think i think that's really frustrating because it's something that you know mine is created by planned parenthood i kind of assumed that if it was created by plant parenthood that it would be a pretty safe app to have but guess what i'm gonna go in and i'm gonna look now because that was my assumption but i don't know i should double check yeah what data what data are they collecting that's it we should know these things everything everything's a commodity if you look at it look at it the right way but not bats bats are just awesome and batty two stories were out this week on the biology of bats the physiology of bats one study the first wanted to find out whether or not bats have an innate sense of the speed of sound or whether like whether they're born understanding how the sounds they make bounce off of objects and just can just understand that innately or whether they have to learn it and so how do you test something like this well of course you raise bats in an environment that has helium in it that's right so researchers with televives university school of zoology they they were looking at the echolocation in bats and they reared bats some in a normal enclosure and others that had helium added to the air helium thinner than normal air so sound goes through the air faster and they were able to test the bats when they echo located on objects a certain distance from them to see what their responses were like and they found that the ones that were raised in and flew in the helium enriched air underestimated the distance to the target they did not they were not ready for the effect of helium they just weren't ready for it and so they did a second experiment where they went and they caught wild bats and brought them back to the lab and then did the same test with and without helium in the air and again the bats underestimated the speed of the sound so if they had been trying to catch a moth they would have totally missed it they wouldn't have been anywhere close and what it suggests is that bats are born with their ability to echolocate and know the speed of sound that it is it is it's in their ears they're calibrated from birth yeah which i thought was yeah super cool and then the other study looked at the magnetic sense of bats and whether they're looking at this interesting idea of orientation and how animals orient at night especially animals that uh that migrate and maybe at night are traveling by the light of the stars the the research published in communications biology from researchers from libnits idw they demonstrated for the first time that environmental signals are important for navigating over long distances and that these signals are picked up by the cornea and in this case they used pipistrellis nathusii nathusias bats while they were migrating and they anesthetized the cornea of the bats eyes so they basically put the cornea of the eyes to sleep they know this is safe because this is the same kind of anesthetization that occurs in eye surgeries in uh by ophthalmologists it desensitizes the cornea so it's uh you get anesthetized and your cornea isn't going to be able to adjust to let light in or out it just relaxes and our cornea is very important for monitoring and managing the amount of light that is led into the eye to be focused on the back of the retina in this experiment they they used lidocaine to anesthetize one eye or both eyes and then they had captured these bats in this migration corridor in the Baltic sea and then they took them inland and released them in an open field they had they had uh volunteers who released the bats and had no idea which eye or which eyes had been anesthetized but then they had to release the bats into the sky and see which directions they went with the assumption that if the cornea was involved in navigation that those that had their corneas anesthetized would not migrate would not move in the right directions they wouldn't be able to be able to orient according to the light the stars in the sky and what they found is that yes indeed the corneas were involved but if the bat has at least one eye working they'll be able to orient just fine so it's with losing both of the corneas made it so that the bats could not navigate and they kind of went all over the place until the lidocaine wore off and then they flew in the right direction so what they say is this evidence in different behavior suggests that corneal anesthesia anesthesia disrupted a sense of direction yet orientation apparently still works well with one eye we observed here for the first time in an experiment how migrating mammal was literally blowing off course a milestone in behavioral and sensory biology that allows us to study the biological navigation system in a more targeted way okay well that's pretty cool except is it really like that stunning of a breakthrough if you blind something it has a hard time navigating well it you know it's a common misconception that bats can't see yeah yeah they can see yeah light very well and another the second part of the experiment they actually to test that it wasn't just light that was the issue they have another Y maze where one end has light in it and the other doesn't and the bats show a preference for light at the end of the tunnel and so when they released into this Y choice maze it didn't matter which eye or any eyes the bats all chose the light at the end of the tunnel so the anesthesia didn't affect their ability to detect light but it affected their ability to orient and so it's this orientation factor not being able to go in the right direction that the researchers are now saying is it signifies that this is the bats magnetic sense that the magnetic sense of these migrating animals is in their cornea yeah I still think that's a stretch I think I think look if you are if your eyes are dilated to where you can see a bright light while walking while walking you can sort of stumble your way in the right direction with your arms out making sure you don't bump it now you're gonna fly now okay this is a whole actual lie all over yeah this is I I mean I would like them to have done this right and that this is the result and that we figured this out but I don't know well it may not be magnetic sense but why but what is so orientation is affected one eye not affected both eyes very affected but it didn't affect their ability to see light to actually detect light so that's so much light it this is yeah this is again like you say like this is the lidocaine in the eye you've if you've gone through an eye exam and had your eyes dilated what exactly does that do to your nighttime vision right and what it how would that affect your orientation and why would it affect your orientation and this is an important question here I think yeah I think if they're looking for the sight of any sort of magneto perception the eyes just seem like evolutionarily right we it it should be in the inner ear if it's anywhere you would think it should be in the inner ear but haven't we had a number of studies now with pigeons and others where it's thought that there's the magnetic particles or other things that are near the beak or in the eyes themselves that that create something of a glow that that could be perceived through the neurons in the eyes as added light to certain certain portions of the visual field where if you are lined up the I say you as if you are the animal if you are lined up with the with magnetic north that perhaps you have more light more a glow in that portion of your field when you're looking this is why the eyes are something that is considered but yeah is it the cornea is it we still don't know but this is a very interesting mammal based experience experiment that again indicates that a certain part of the eyes is involved in orientation perhaps maybe it still is just an artifact of the fact that they were dilating these bad eyes yeah I feel like that so but you know like I've been just like a really basic experiment where they have a treat they have like a couple places where treats can be put and the place where the treat is always has a really strong magnet one of those one of those magnets you got to be careful uh you can't play with because if it gets on your refrigerator you'll never get it off kind of something one of those really strong medium yes yeah but wherever whenever that magnet is in one of these containers there's a treat there and it's every time you just train them on that a couple times and then put those treats out there and see if they always slide to the one with the magnet bats pigeons whatever it is has that even have we even started with the basics like how do we know what I mean yes that that's interesting I think it's it's less about attraction it's less about attraction to magnets and it's more about sensing a magnetic field for orientation right but this is my point like if you created a treat reason for a specific uh field then maybe but you like I'm not there's even been uh they have disrupted magnetic fields in that you you can set up chambers where you have a strong magnet that overpowers true magnetic north and they have been able to shift birds and other animals to to get them to fly the wrong direction because of shifting these magnetic fields and so there have been experiments that have definitively shown that magneto reception is a thing we just don't know the mechanism we haven't figured out and it could be different in different animals for all that we know it could have evolved differently in different species but um yeah it's it definitely is a thing but how does it work magnets how do they work magic yeah we actually went bats are involved but I thought those two studies were pretty fun bat biology but but in this in the same one you could you could dilate the bat and have the magnetic treat at one end and the non and then they could crawl to it they wouldn't even need to fly so you could tell whether or not they needed their vision to see the magnetic just like there's other ways to do the design and the experiment I don't think you need to throw the throw the bat something blind and throw it into the yeah don't make them fly blind that's not the bat and throw it into the sky oh that's so wrong my final my final story for the night is all about consciousness consciousness what is it well you know it's the the technical description of consciousness is that it is your awareness of sensory input and behavioral action so your brain you know what is going on when you're conscious you don't know what is going on when you are unconscious right well researchers just published in cell reports their study looking at looking for the part of the brain that allows consciousness to happen basically the gating mechanism the key master the gatekeeper for consciousness in our brains and they used propofol which is an anesthetic to put volunteers into various states of unconsciousness and ask them to do various neural exercises mental exercises of imagining animals imagining navigating and then imagining squeezing their hand and then actually squeezing their hand and so they measured all this in functional magnetic resonance imaging to be able to get an idea of what areas of the brain were active during certain actions and in changing from one action to another from imaginary actions to physical actions and in the process of this what they eventually had people do was they they had them look at a screen in which they were going to be shown just like some fuzzy graphics but right before those fuzzy graphics started there was a quick picture of the face so fast it's just barely long enough visible long enough for a brain to pick it up and while they were flashing that face on the screen and then having them look at pictures after that they later asked the people if they saw the face when they did and when they didn't and so this is the conscious recall of a saw face or what face I didn't see a face anyway the researchers then found by looking at their functional magnetic resonance imaging images of the brain that there was one particular part of the brain that stood out among all the others and it's a little teeny tiny part of the brain called the anterior insula the anterior insula has been implicated in all sorts of things like emotional regulation and concentration and a lot of things it has it has connections to our attention network and our default mode network which are important in the switching between consciousness and unconsciousness people have thought about it as a possible contender for the seat of consciousness previously but in this experiment in which they played with people's conscious awareness with propa fall making them anesthetized or not anesthetized and playing this imagery to them versus having them be conscious of seeing a face or not seeing a face it was this anterior insula that popped up and they are pretty positive that this is the part of the brain that if it's active it is shunting information from your sensory system up to the higher levels of your cortex for processing and awareness and when it is turned off you're gonna know anything you're not conscious yeah so we found it the seat of consciousness it's in your brain and it's not it's not like a whole it's not consciousness isn't it is your whole brain working together but there's a part of the brain that's important no what you know and what you don't know your anterior insula your anterior insula is there is there something like this in animals and i think that's the next big question is which animals um great question would have a structure like this yeah so that i think is the next big question and i'm sure that comparative neuroanatomists would know the answer to this question already yeah actually let me let's stop sharing that i know it's late anterior anterior insula neurobiologist is on the case yeah i don't know so this is a really it's an interesting question i'd love to find out if it is something that there's an analogous structure or structure or something similar in in other species well he's just having the structure enough for us to say that the animals can do the same thing or is just have to light up in a certain way at a certain time there's also right right and even if they have this structure is it exactly the same yeah and they might have consciousness and it might be in a different place in their brain because it might have developed uh convergently right anyway it's a very interesting question but now this is the part of the brain that you know if you're taken a mental break is going to sleep when you go to sleep tonight and are not conscious for a long time it's not just your pawns and your lower brain that's turning everything off it's your anterior insula is probably taking a big break as well i'm sorry can you repeat that my anterior insula oh no oh no it's already happening my anterior insula says it's time for us to end the show woo but before we go i do want to say those of you who are on the eastern seaboard you're in for a big treat the next week or so brood x is coming treat the cacophony the cacophony of the cicadas is coming there will be billions of them in the eastern united states this is the uh the population of cicadas that take 17 years to emerge so these buggers have been underground for a very long time they're gonna come to life and do all their mating excitingness and then be a lot of food for animals for a little while and then they're going to go back into the ground into their their burrows yes the eggs will be there turn into they'll hatch and turn into nymphs and 17 years from now it'll happen again oh 17 years already can you snooze it for another year yeah one more nope this year no snooze button this year so uh i'd love to know if you see cicadas emerging wherever you are brood x is on its way 100 decibels louder than a leaf blower or a lawn mower that's a lot that's god cicadas are so loud the first time i heard them i it was unreal yeah i had to ask somebody what it was what is that noise oh jeez oh yeah yikes well this this is the sound of this weekend science coming to an end but i do want to thank everybody for joining us for another episode of this weekend science and i want to take some time to thank the people who helped this show out thank you to my co-hosts thank you to fada for doing social media and show notes thank you to identity four for recording the show thank you gordon mcleod for manning the chat rooms rachel thank you for your assistance and thank you to all of our patreon sponsors thank you john ratna swami kira carol cornfield melanie stegman de kramstek karen tawsey woody ms andrey beset chris wozniak david bun vega chef's dad house nighter don stylo's aka don stylo john sheolie guillaume john lee ali coffin matty pair and gaurav sharma shubhru darwin hannon donald mundes steven albaran darryl myshak stu polyc andrew swanson front us 104 sky luke paul ronovitch kevin reared in noodles jack brian kerington matt bass joshua fury shonanina lamb john mckay greg riley marqueson clo jean tellier steve leesman aka zima ken haze howard tan christopher rappin dana pierd dana pierce and richard brendan minnish johnny gridley kevin railsback flying out christopher drier mark mazaros artyom greg briggs john atwood the profile name is hilarious in the context of some other podcast rudy garcia dav wilkinson rodney lewis paul and matt sutter philip shane curt 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end of the world so i'm setting up a shop got my banner unfurled it says the scientist is in i'm gonna sell my advice show them how to stop the robot with a simple device i'll reverse the warming with a wave of my hand and all it'll cost you is a couple of grand coming your way so everybody listen to what i say i use the scientific method and i'll broadcast my opinion on science this week in science science science science this week in science this week in science this week in science science science i've got one disclaimer and it shouldn't be news that what i say may not represent your views but i've done the calculations and i've got a plan if you listen to the science you may just get understand that we're not trying to threaten your philosophy we're just trying to throw everybody like we say and if you use our method instead of this week in science this week in science this week in science this week in science this week in science this week in science this week in science science science the 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 but how can i ever see the changes i seek when i can only set up shop one hour up to what we say and if you've learned this week in science this week in science science science science this week in science this week in science this week in science science science this week in science this week in science this week in that I made why is Zazzle so complicated uh let me look let me log in and see what's happening why is no good where I wanted to be I wanted to it says they've been posted for sale but they're not in my store okay let me look Zazzle.com slash this week in science how did you make them is my first question yeah I don't know did you just start with a blank piece or did you like copy something that we already had no it was a blank piece okay so let me see because you might have made it for yourself and not to sell well it got an email that says oh maybe it hasn't been did it yesterday it says it should appear in the Zazzle marketplace within 24 hours okay so it needed to be approved then um we see is it under review uh reviews no that's not what I want I want here I can my order my oh they changed it yeah it's too oh they changed the interface how funny yeah sell let me go my stores this store this is what I want okay and then products and then hi Sadie hi Sadie she's watching her father leave here I can show you yeah show me oh yeah this I forgot I made this stretch pants oh my god yes late night stretch pants those are fun here yeah I made it's just cute but I made a t-shirt also oh full of science goodness that's fun uh full of science it's not in the store yet no okay so let me see so products and I also have a t-shirt where it's I've looked at the under review before and also let me say I have had things that had never left review and I've sent multiple emails about it I don't even think it's in under review I don't know what's going on Zazzle confuses me don't you want to be full of sciencey collection it's got the it's got the twist logo on one side that you can be full of sciencey goodness with a donut on the oh continue I don't think it's fully posted yet okay got an email that says it is solid so confused all options events and occasions recipients to our category new products tags suitable audience show customize it button royalty percent I have the right post anyway anyway oh there will be something showing up soon I think I might be in there now let's see did you find it I well I posted the I better posted it to Twitter oh yeah the it's all in your head hat I have tried to sell multiple times and it's so yeah so they're in safe designs and they're like no that is my t-shirt in safe designs here I'm looking under review I found it uh no there's nothing the only things under review were our postage stamps which they pulled at some point and I think it's because they stopped working with stamps comm and and the embroidered polo because they stopped selling the polo that we had it on yeah so now where's my store my store let me see I found it I've got it but I don't know yeah oh t-shirt oh there's no sell it button that's why why I don't know oh we need one of those where designed for you by this week in science right designed for you to buy is it like a one-off purchase that you're setting up yeah maybe I maybe I just don't know how to use Zazzle yeah so the the mug is now in the store so how'd you how'd you get to that t-shirt this is where was it this is a link that Zazzle sent me oh weird and said that this is what's gonna go in your store understand I see you Blair Baz is the Zazzle master just look Blair do it but they've got it set up so there's like this stuff on the side now and then they've got they totally change the interface this thing my stuff very cool I like it and then in the back the back has the twist thing I need that one put it science in goodness okay I gotta go okay where are you going I'll see you guys next week uh breakfast and then bed good planning that's the order show then breakfast then bed perfect perfect seems a little backwards but you know that's just me it's Chris this week all in a good day all in a good day see you guys next week okay see you Justin have some good rest to hope you sleep better during the day maybe who knows take care I where is your t-shirt I don't know where it ended up I don't know save to sign an email I don't know these things not making any sense to me whatsoever under a view revise and resubmit I don't know where that t-shirt is right where it is that's really weird I just forwarded did oh you forwarded it to me the zazzle email to you so okay let me see have the direct links now okay I have to put some um I should never some of the newer images do anything no no no no no no no no no you forwarded it I didn't get it oh no no didn't get it oh I see why never mind you sent it to the wrong email I sent it from the wrong email oh yeah noodles it's not it wouldn't be the supply if it was a supply issue it would still show up in the no it's just like a weird system issue where it's not showing up and I don't understand why I was very excited about these new shirts though I think everybody should have a full of science goodness shirt your designs are now for sale it says that's what I said yeah that's what I thought um okay design for you by this weekend science full of science goodness view all products yeah oh no that was she changed her name again um nadelva hmm is the accidental viking oh caroline right oh yeah do I think triple as 2022 will happen I hope so I can be optimistic and hope I think a lot I mean ha they will want to really be planning it right now so it's just hard to hard to figure it out it all I think it really all depends what happens in the fall yeah I just I feel like it's kind of the summer we have to kind of wait and see and then when everybody goes back to school and goes back to work and the winter starts to come again I feel like we have to kind of see what's going to happen I think a lot of live conferences and live events need to figure that out I mean there's also not just having the live event but also determining whether or not you want to be a part of having people travel across the country and you know and how do you do that I mean we don't have the you know vaccine passports but I mean maybe maybe it's the kind of thing where you have to say you know you can only come if you're vaccinated because it just it just you can't let everybody come well in the problem with that too is that um but then if people have cancer or if they have autoimmune disorders or anything that keeps them from getting vaccinated how do you you know how do you give some people unvaccinated okays to come to events and other people not yeah well and then where are you going to have it because also there's a certain governor that has decided that vaccine passports are won't be a thing so then you know local government has weird powers related to what is safe um so yeah I mean I've been hearing a lot of weird things like like uh what is it Columbus Ohio they're gonna do sporting events in outdoor arenas like baseball kind of thing um but have vaccinated sections and unvaccinated sections and that to me seems weird whoa that just seems weird that seems extremely weird that seems like way more uh risky it does seem risky it's like okay so you're gonna take all the unvaccinated people and put them all together where they can infect each other so that's your plan now how is this gonna work out for you I'm just like you're who what who what scientists are you talking to how's that how's that working none is the answer yeah none scientists yeah I'm not skipping summer I am all about summer I'm pretty excited I've been cold for a long time I'm excited to not be cold for a little bit I mean I don't like 100 degree temperatures I don't like humidity I don't like fires I hope that we don't have fires like we've had I mean this is a huge drought so the entire west coast is dry dry dry dry dry and that's gonna be interesting yeah I don't know hot rod I feel like this summer with COVID people people who are vaccinated I hope have a good time I'm I'm very excited to be able to have outdoor barbecues with people who I haven't hung out with in a year because we're all vaccinated now you know I'm not excited about going to a movie theater with a bunch of people I don't know that's not something I'm interested in doing but it's summer so outdoors and enjoying enjoying those kind of outdoor experiences with people I think it'll be great yeah socializing with other humans I think that's going to happen more and I think it's a lot of it's going to be okay and a lot of people are saying you know we're we got the vaccine so that we could be with other people and yeah the more people get vaccinated the more people more people get vaccinated the more people will be safe congregating together so yeah it's just better that way goodnight Eric and I the accidental viking I see now that you changed your name because Americans could not pronounce Nadelva correctly so I'm doing it wrong then I apologize sorry about that yeah and if you're outside I mean if I'm in my backyard I'm not wearing a mask right I'm outside if I am need Elva thank you so the CDC telling us to be maskless we talked about that last week right Blair and yeah it's up to everybody still I don't think we should judge people I think I I hope that the people who are not wearing a mask are vaccinated you know when you're outside running around but at the same time I'm also if I'm at a park or walking on the sidewalk but there's not a lot of people on the sidewalk I'm not going to stress about that it's I mean this is like the super on PC way for me to I was just like comment you today how now when I go out and I walk my dog there's this internal question that I always ask when I see someone without a mask under I'm like are you not wearing a mask because you're vaccinated and you read what the CDC said or have you just never worn a mask yeah should should I be mad at you for not wearing a mask right now because you've never worn a mask and you don't care about other people or are you just following up the CDC says because I can't tell you don't know we don't know we don't know and because this is because as a society we're so mixed right now and we have extremists that either end you know of the spectrum of things that that they're doing or not doing um yeah it's tough because I mean the thing that I keep saying is if I was walking or hiking or running or walking my dog or doing anything outside where I am 10 feet behind somebody else that's walking at the same speed as me yeah I would want them to be wearing a mask because I'm in their airstream for a long time yeah and I think that's that's the part that that gets me is that it's exactly what we're talking about last week like when you have all these conditions on what is safe people only hear okay I don't have to wear my mask outside anymore yeah it's not if you're vaccinated and you're more than six feet away from people and you're only going to be in shared space for less than two minutes and and and then you can not wear a mask yeah we talked about like all the seven the seven seven or more mitigation factors that schools do to reduce risk and it's it's like how do you get that that's the thing that has I think been the hardest part of getting people invested in social distancing you know so the social distancing as a phrase used in public health includes physical distance it includes time distancing yourself like so you're not spending a lot of time with people and its masks it like incorporates all those things and that's people don't understand that necessarily and they're like well I stood six feet away and they get that one basic rule in their head but they don't understand the nuances of why it's six feet you know and you know why in a grocery store does it not really matter whether it's six feet or 60 feet because all the air in the store is getting mixed and it depends on the ventilation patterns and yeah yeah I don't know um need Elva need Elva you're saying the that you think areas of the US are going to be constantly fighting this virus and I think areas of the world areas of the United States I think that's absolutely true we're going to have pockets that are vaccinated pockets that are not and it's constantly going to be going constantly I mean there was somebody on npr today saying that I mean it's what we've been talking about forever that uh you're going to get your annual COVID shot and it's never going away we could have we could have done that but the way but no specifically the way that one that vaccination rates are dropping in the United States indicates they don't expect us to get to herd immunity in the United States but two these other variants and surges in other places in the world and the continuation of travel means that most likely this planet is not getting to herd immunity like nowhere yeah are they gonna get to herd maybe Australia they continue to lock it down over there right Australia New Zealand we've got a few places that have done it yeah but if my day we were allowed to travel to Australia just fully like yeah and it's if we don't if we're not gonna get to herd immunity what that means is that it's constantly going to be bubbling up we're gonna find new variants we're gonna need new boosters because it'll mutate and we'll need something that helps us get around that mutation uh just it's so sad but what it makes me it makes me so sad that because people couldn't wait because people were not patient because because our government couldn't support people to allow them that space and freedom to be able to stay home and not work not worry about rent that what we ended up with is a situation that's even worse than anything we're gonna it's going to continue and we're opening up all over the country anyway because everybody's like well over with us and we're over it and I got my vaccine I want to go do all the things yeah I got my vaccine and people are numb to the death numbers people are numb to the long term it's yeah and Gaurav you're talking about India there's yeah there's so much death right now it's there's so yeah I'm so mad at people well it's I mean it comes down to the people here right now watching no you're good I'm not gonna say I'm 100% thrilled with the current leadership that our country has but I think they've done a heck of a lot better job than the previous and I can't help but wonder what would have happened if somebody willing to make a tough decision was sitting in that space when this all started because that's really what this comes down to right is there's politicians all over on both sides of the aisle I live in California what's happening here right now uh oh there's a recall election let me just do everything that everyone wants right so it's there's there's a pressure and politicians are are bowing to the pressure and not making the difficult decision if somebody said I'm locking down the entire United States you cannot cross state lines schools are closed I'm sending everyone checks to not go to work like if it had all been done like that for six weeks it's the whole thing just talking about the whole time right if that difficult decision was made at the beginning it would have cost less less people would have died and it would be done yeah but there were so many missteps it's nobody wanted to make the unpopular choice nobody wanted to step up and be the the kind of the bad cop the bad the the tough parent right who's like you know I'm sorry but you have to I have to ground you like we had to be grounded and nobody wanted to be I'm sorry United States you are a petulant child yeah like nobody wanted to get yelled at that way and so here we are it's very frustrating and of course you know everyone's sick of it even people that that know this is real and know it's it's bad there are people who are just over it and who can blame them who can blame them I don't blame yeah it's it's tiring people want lives back they want experiences back they want opportunities and we will be studying the neurological effects metabolic effects all of the effects of the past 18 months plus when we're all done with this metabolic effects of my basement metabolic effects of my basement I mean it's we all went a little crazy right so like I am not sane I just want you to know that I've I've gone through looking back on things I don't think I ever thought I was depressed I was very lucky I did not lose my job I get along very well with my co-habitant I adopted a dog months before the the pandemic started I ended up getting a new job like all these things happened that that I am extremely lucky about how this pandemic has gone thus far I have lost one close friend to COVID which is very very very very sad but I know other people have gone through much more than I have but thinking back on things I you know I never would have said I'm depressed but there was definitely something wrong with my brain and my emotional state this time last year something was wrong and and looking back on that now I can see that and also now by the way having been vaccinated and gone going out to do some things it's it's scared it's I've been rewired and I'm like scared of crowded spaces in a way I've never been before I feel weird doing things I feel I'm an extrovert and I feel drained now after I hang out with people because I'm so we're not in my world I just want to go home and so it totally rewired me like I could have gone out to lunch with a friend out to dinner with a friend out to brunch the next day out to dinner with a friend and like I could have done that for a three-day weekend and not feel tired felt energized felt excited and that's you know true extrovert stuff right yeah but now I do one social event and I'm I'm done for the weekend that's it no more people I did it that's good it's totally rewired my brain it's crazy yeah so I mean anyway my point being I totally get why people are totally sick of this and need change and have to get out and it's been too long it's been too long it didn't have to be this long no it didn't it didn't yeah yeah and we're all frustrated about that and tired and but I'm looking forward to summer outdoors maybe just maybe there's some summertime to be had get to visit my dad again yeah some good things good things are coming although travel does make me stressed out so you know being at home this last year was great Pam in the chat was saying she thinks it's great where we've been at home to be able to spend more time with each other at home which that was one thing that was wonderful this year but yeah I do think I've grown like I've grown weirdly codependent with my partner now in a way that's like it's we get along so well which I'm not going to complain about at all but now we are police in inside jokes to each other all the time weird voices each other sentences yeah it just it's now whenever now I'm going into work like a day a week now and so now when I go to work I'll I'll just see something and be like oh I can't say that here or like oh no one will know what I'm talking about if I bring that up and it's yeah it's very funny to have been around him and my dog and that's it for over a year yeah pretty wild I think I'm codependent with my basement yeah well oh basement you're so nice to me you give me a place to be and the place for my computers identity for that's so sad about your mom not wanting to get vaccinated it's not just come on family members everybody get vaccinated so we don't have to ban each other come on come on I like working from home but I've always worked from home I like I wanted to make life from home but now I want now I want other people to go away I think I'm I was pretty excited to start going into the office again just because like also I'm just in a different room which is really cool and I'm not surrounded by I don't know things that need cleaning and just you know other things I can kind of focus but I am home that like a lot of jobs I'm hoping that my job will be able to be hybrid after this because yeah it's been proven that I can get a lot done at home and use my own wi-fi and my own power and it you know it's because I work for the government now fossil fuels are something that they have to report so if people can do telecommute days yeah then then it reduces commute hours and so that can help them with their their quota for that so yeah I am hoping that I get to do some some telecommute days every week after all this is over I think it's proven that a lot of jobs where people thought like you you have to be in the office productivity you have to be in the office a bunch of jobs they're like oh I guess you could do a day or two a week at home and it would be fine at home yeah we don't control you're still productive despite your significant others and your children and your pets you were still productive I think there's that it's an idea of it's there are some managers and companies want to like they it's not just a job this is now your life you know it's not it's they own you now you got a job but it's this is they own you and your time while you're working and yeah it's hard to do that when you're at home I found myself ranting a lot lately and I probably ranted on an after show not too long ago about this but I was ranting recently about how automation and computers and the internet and excel spreadsheets and all of these things that we didn't have 20 years ago even I mean we had some of those things 20 years ago but not to the level that we currently have them right and that has increased productivity for any job that involves a computer so much and how it should have worked is oh you can get an eight hour done day done in four hours great you work a four hour day now four hours yeah no but no oh eight hours have worked done in four hours now do 16 hours of work in eight hours how did who decided this I I know who decided this but also but what how did we accept that how did we go okay because of union busting but did I say that okay union busting and also you know companies taking advantage of people wanting to be good at what they do there is right yeah oh you feel passionate about what you do you're like I will work I want to do this I'll do more I'll do more oh yeah oh I got my project done what can I do next which is great but also if you used to have to input data off a piece of paper and it would take a full day to do a stack of data and now the data automatically gets put in a spreadsheet and into a database and it takes five minutes what do I do now that that doesn't mean that you expand your job description and work that much more it's it's very frustrating to be because the amazing technological advances we have made should mean that we have more time to be with our families that's what they should have done for us but instead we bring these devices home that connect us to our jobs we you know never mind the pandemic but there's like you know all the things we don't know how to turn off people take emails on the weekends I'm like hey no no yeah I stopped doing work on the weekends and then I started working with academics again and they started emailing me on the weekends and I'm like who are you go away go away now working on a weekend unless I have to do have to have to but yeah oh my goodness yeah I don't I don't understand any of it I don't get it I don't understand how we as a society just went okay more work for less money you got it no I want to have my time just the fact I just got so depressed thinking about how like yeah a third a third of my day is spent sleeping and another third of my day is spent working that's not and then how much of your day is spent getting ready for work yes yeah how much how many hours do I spend like driving to and from work or making lunch for my work or like you know packing my bag for it just it all adds up and then yeah that's congratulations on retiring with my someday oh man that's actually that's one of my favorite things about my new job is the retirement plan that's great I just feel like I'm like okay when I retire what projects am I gonna do like well I'm already really excited because you know I'm other things I'm running volunteer programs I've I've learned all about what it takes to be a camp host a campsite host and I just think it would be so fun once I retire to buy a trailer and just be a camp host do like six months here a year there and just do the whole the whole all the national and state parks and like just hopscotch all over the U.S. and Canada that would be fun it'd be a camp host it'd be so fun welcome Donald Brandt we are in our after show right now we're just just talking about dreams dreams versus reality camp host would be awesome that that would be very fun oh so cool yeah because then it like gives you something to do a big so you you're volunteering maybe you know for for us it's like 20 hours a week but yeah you just you volunteer to help out on the park and then you get to live there for free yeah you get to welcome people into the campsites sell firewood just oh my gosh I think it'd be so fun it might get old quickly like Shoebrew's saying in the chat but I don't know it depends on the site it depends on the type of person you are like I like to stay busy and you know it's we have people in the parks that that I'm in charge of now that have been camp hosts for like six years in the same site in the same park yeah we had to put a limit on them now now there's a three-year limit but um you some people got to live in the camp but yeah it's uh there are some people who want to do it forever I have not seen Nomadland Nidalva I heard it's a little depressing so I decided not to watch it I don't like depressing things I've heard it's very good though but I don't know if it's one for me I like things like what's the what's the new one on Netflix whatever versus the machines it's really good it's really good also Shadow and Bone on Netflix I've heard of that really good fantasy it's super I I saw the trailer and was very confused about what it was about well it's a young adult fantasy series they turned into TV and it's good I really like it it's really good yeah we want better than what we've got Brian Burwell yeah you can get there you can get there hey Blair is it time for bed should we go and put our interior insolence out I mean mine's been I really haven't been conscious for this entire conversation hopefully there will be new t-shirts in the store soon maybe it just needs more time I think so because I can't find it anywhere it's like it's in a purgatory I think it'll pop up but the but the the mug popped up so that's progress it's progress we shall get there with sciencey goodness for all say good night Blair good night Blair say good night kiki good night kiki and everyone good night everyone good night everyone thank you for joining us for another episode of twists and our aftershow discussion we'll be back next week I hope everyone had a wonderful Cinco de Mayo Cinco de Mayo I had zero salsa today oh that's okay it's like not a real holiday anywhere right it's another thing it's like it's not even celebrated in Mexico yeah because it's an American holiday meant to celebrate the relationship between the Mexicans and the Americans but yeah right most people just use it as an excuse to get drunk drink a margaritas totally barf up salsa so and I don't like tequila so there you go news for everyone as we say good night on this Cinco de Mayo have a wonderful week we will see you next week with more science I hope you stay well thanks again