 And it's scrolling. There we go. We are live returning to the interwebs at 8pm-ish on a Wednesday evening as we love to do. This is the live broadcast of the This Week in Science podcast and as you may know, if you have heard this recording, the podcast, watched the video before as we stream, you'll know that this stream is the live real deal. Not everything ends up in the podcast because that gets edited thanks to Rachel. All right, everyone. Are you ready to do it to do a show? I'm ready. Check. Everyone's ready? Yes. Yes. So great. This is exciting. We're ready to go. Okay. Okay. We're getting ready in a three, a two, this is twist. This Week in Science Episode Number 840, recorded on Wednesday, September 1st, 2021. What's up with science now? Hey, everyone. I'm Dr. Kiki. And tonight on the show, we will fill your heads with disappearances, discoveries, and just good science news. But first. Disclamer, disclaimer, disclaimer. The world is full of secrets, hidden knowledge that life on the planet uses every day to survive. Most life is blissfully unaware that these secrets exist. They rely on them. But at the end of the day, if you make it to the end of the day, why question anything? Humans are curious, case of a life form that does question everything. We want to know all the secrets. Thanks to science, much of the mystery of how life works has actually been revealed. We know so much, rely so much on that knowledge, and survive better the more knowledge we have. And this isn't unique to the modern age. Humans have been curiously unlocking the secrets of the world for hundreds of thousands of years, even our archaic, pre-human ancestors did it. Discovering how to make stone axes with stone tools, building fires for warm flight and to cook with, unlocking physical and chemical properties of different materials to make life on earth more survivable. It is so ingrained in our mental makeup to believe that there are secrets that even when humans are not engaged in science, they tend to believe that there are secrets. Which is why it is so important to teach humans science. Because without science, the secrets that the secrets tend to come to are things like taking, I don't know, horse heartworm medication to treat viral infections, just as if for instance I made up out of the top of my head. When everyone knows the only way to fend off a virus is absolutely, positively listening to This Week in Science, coming up next. I've got the kind of mind I can't get enough. I want to live every day of the week. There's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek. Good science to you, Dr. Kiki and Blair. And yes, we do. And a good science to you too, Justin Blair, Dr. Patel and everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of This Week in Science. We are back again to talk about all the wondrous science discoveries that we discovered and would like to talk with you about this week. All right. What did I bring for the show tonight? I brought, well, I brought a disappearing bit of debris and maybe discovering where that debris may have gone. I've also got something to talk about your face and your personality and maybe why your friends are your friends. Those are coming up later. And additionally tonight, we are joined by our special guest, Dr. Alec Patel, host of the Nova Science Podcast, Nova Now. He's here to talk with us tonight about the week's stories and we're going to talk with him about what he does. And it's going to be very exciting. Thank you for joining us tonight. Thank you for having me. I'm not sure if I'm yet cool enough to be a part of this like dynamic trio, but let's see. It's not a high bar. I can tell it's a high bar. I don't know. It's not a high bar. Just a bar that's high enough to lean against and have a nice drink of science. That was that was like so like reflective. I like it. All right. What are the stories that we have lined up additionally, Justin? I've got just good news. A new news segment where I just say good news about things. Oh, I really like that. And I appreciate it. Thank you. I'm really hoping that's not the sarcastic. Okay. I knew it. I've also got a 9,000 year old beer discovery. Cribs for coral and microbial rain. Oh, I'm into the 9,000 year old beer. Yes. I don't know if I am actually that. I don't know. But yeah, we're going to have to talk about that just a little bit. Blair. What is in the animal corner? Oh, I have some crafty cockatoos, some cranky cephalopods, and I also have why we should just pay everyone more. Is this how you ask for a raise, Blair? If everybody gets it, I'll get one too. You get a raise and you get a raise and you get a raise. Yes. Yes. Okay. Well, our stories are lined up and so is our guest. And as we jump into the show, I would like to remind you that if you have not yet subscribed to This Week in Science, you can find us on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitch on Twitch. We're at Twist Science. We're also Twist Science on Twitter and Instagram. We're on all the podcast directories, Google, Apple, Spotify, Stitcher Speaker, TuneIn, Radio.com, Amazon, all of them. Our website is twist.org. Twist Worldwide. Yeah. I mean, the internet's man. It's like lousy reach. Okay, let's dive in. Let's talk about some disappearances. Mysteries are always fun, aren't they? This is one of the reasons we love science. Everything is a mystery and we're curious about how things work. Okay, have you ever thought about the fact that when our solar system was turning into a solar system at one point in time? Little babe is solar system, right? Before there were the rocky bodies known as Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars. There were different bodies that Earth was a lava pit. It was a very big icky place and then it got impacted by a giant other planet that they melted together. And then we got a moon out of it. And we got a moon out of it. But in that process, it wasn't like, I just laid a moon. Planetary formation is not that easy, right? So this other body came in, smashed into the earth or what the proto-earth, and you had a bunch of debris. A lot of it became the asteroid belt similar to stuff from Mars and Venus. All of the rocky bodies went into forming the asteroid belt. But not all of the debris is accounted for. They've done calculations to try and figure out the mass of the asteroid belt and where the masses of different things would have gone, should have gone, and they're coming up short. Where did it go? Have you ever thought about that? I was just going to say, I think it sounds easy how you describe it. It's just a bunch of things smashing into each other and then they're like, something stuck. I was like, I think figuring out the mystery sounds harder than actually forming a planet. Hot take. Hot take. Mysteries are hard. Well, this disappearing debris, some researchers have just published their paper suggesting that if these situations were happening and it was hot and it was dynamic, well, a lot of that material wouldn't have turned into debris would have vaporized. And so these vapors produced from the heat and the pressure of the impacts that were taking place, they would have just floated off, disappeared. You know, just I'm a gas and here I go and little solar system. Kind of a good way to solve an equation. Well, we've got something at the end of this equation that doesn't make sense. Just vaporize it. Yeah. So that's what we've got to do. Make it go away. It was hot. It was a lot of pressure. They were under a lot of pressure. So of course, gasification. Alternatively, though, there is another study that is out this week suggesting that a lot of stars in that we might find sun-like stars could be eating their protoplanets. So planets like the earth around the galaxy, around the universe, may have been absorbed eaten by their stars. Their stars might have expanded and pulled them in with their gravitational force and then no planets. The way they figured this out, they were looking at binary star pairs and looking to see whether or not they were exactly twin-like stars or whether some of those stars, one of the pair, had a difference and overabundance of certain metals that wouldn't be present unless they had absorbed rocky planets. Isn't that like what the sun is supposed to do to our planet? Eventually the sun's going to expand and just Pokemon our asses up also. Not Pokemon. I guess Pac-Man. Pac-Man. Yeah. Wacka-wacka-wacka. Yeah, not Pokemon, but I guess Earth is like a Pokemon. Anyway, I think it makes sense based on the fact that we don't know what the hell is happening in the expanding universe and people see metals out there and you make these conjectures based on what we can see and observe around us. Yeah. Yeah, so it could have gasified, disappeared, flown away out into the interstellar space, or maybe the debris was eventually eaten up by the sun, but we haven't seen that. Our sun is just normal, doesn't have an overabundance of any metals. So, yeah, this is where we are right now. But knowing what we know about the fact that there are about a third of star, sun-like stars out there probably have eaten their planets, we can use this knowledge to figure out where we should not search for life. But we're like in the range of stars that are out there, aren't we kind of on the weekend? We're kind of like a small, it's like, not even a, no, I don't even think we're mediocre. Okay, so maybe even some bigger stars, but these stars are eating their planets, Justin. Okay, Justin, don't neg our solar system. No, I'm thinking it's a great job. I'm not saying, I'm not trying to take anything away from it. I'm just saying there's some like... Much bigger stars. Yeah. Well, the fact that our star isn't that hungry is the reason why we have, you know, the ability to have life on this planet. So maybe to Dr. King's point, like we live for the stars who are not yet ready for happy hour, and we're like, okay, those are the planets that might have a shot to have our alien brothers and sisters. And my only point is like in the same way that Pluto is now a dwarf planet, and no longer considered a real planet, there's dwarf stars that are the size of the Earth. Like, you know, there's those brown giants, those ones that just burned out and couldn't just, just couldn't hack it being a sun. They just didn't quite make it. They weren't big enough to supernova. They're not going to implode into a black hole. They just went dim and floated around. Those can be the size of our own sun. Yeah. I don't know. They need to be more hungry. Got to be hungry. But I don't know, Justin, we need some good news. Oh, yes. So this is, I created a new segment because let's look. Occasionally I pay attention to the listeners of the show. And occasionally it has been, they have let it be known that they want their science, but they do not want to be bummed out by it. And occasionally I have not painted the rosies to pictures. So I'm offering me, I'm offering this new segment, Just Good News. This is the Global Ecology Edition. After a five-year assessment coordinated by Botanic Gardens Conservation International and specialists from the International Union for Conservation of Nature, great news. Many of the world's trees species are not currently threatened with extinction. The study looked at the risks to 58,497 different tree species worldwide. And it found that 30% are threatened, sorry, it found 40% are not under current threat of extinction, with another 7% possibly not threatened. And 21% that they just didn't have enough data for their evaluation. In the report, deforestation rates at an all-time, I'm gonna skip that part. Showing distribution of tree species according to their conservation status, Brazil, tropical cascading ecosystem, jeez, I thought there was good news in here. Oh no, here it is, I found it. Okay, this is the thing that caught my eye and I was like, aha, this is Jean-Christopher Vai, Director of the General Foundation, Frank Liania, this is in France. It's messed it up, but it's fine. It's not being translated into French. Tree species, this is quoting, tree species that have evolved over millions of years are adapting to climate changes. Aha, great news. And can no longer survive the onslaught of human threats, how short-sighted we are to allow the loss of tree species on which global societies ecologically and economically dependent, if we could only learn to respect trees, undoubtedly many environmental challenges would greatly benefit. You know, what would benefit is if this good news segment, you like read the stories really before you actually came to report them. 40 percent of tree species are not under current threat of extinction. Right. That's been 40 percent. The good news. That's a failing grade. Yeah, 40, and then 20 percent could even be evaluated. I'm like, all right, all right, okay. So I admit this idea came to me at the last, I read the, got the email right before the show. I tried to find something. I'll look harder next week. For some good news. Thank you, Justin. All right, everyone. As we suffer from the bad news of the good news, Blair, do you have some good ideas? I do. Yeah. It turns out according to science, if you pay people more, they maybe do a better job at their job. Interesting. So this is a Cornell, SC Johnson College of Business study. They looked at kind of a natural experiment that took place in Santa Clara County in California. They looked at data for more than 97,000 online reviews of restaurants in the county because it just so happened in March of 2013, the minimum wage in San Jose rose from eight to $10 while the wage in the other cities in the county, Cupertino, Los Altos, Milpitas, Mountain View, Palo Alto, Santa Clara, and Sunnyvale, their minimum wage did not go up at all. So they were allowed to have this kind of natural experiment to look at restaurant reviews of restaurants where the minimum wage went up $2 an hour and where it did not. And they were also able to compare chain restaurants to independent and privately owned restaurants. And they found that negative discussion of the courtesy and friendliness of workers decreased with increased wages. This inferred an improvement in service quality and independently owned restaurants also scored higher than those compared with that were chain restaurants because they think that it has to do with something about the control of quality and independent choice in how they manage staff as opposed to the kind of chain structure of this. This is how it works. This is exactly yes. And so the implication here is that there's a potential positive impact on customer service, not just on the employees themselves, if you raise wages, there is there's an argument that is had that if you raise minimum wage at restaurants, customers will actually have a worse time because everything will cost more. But that's not what this showed. This showed that really overall, it appears there was a nice kind of trickle up where the employees felt take it more taken care of more valued whatever it was. They cared more about their work. I don't know. Maybe they were able to hire better people. There could be any number of reasons that a higher wage led to a higher customer satisfaction, but it appears to have impacted the quality of the experience. So I thought this is a neat study because it's an excellent opportunity. It was an opportunity. It was just like this very weird niche change happened in this very small geographic location. So the clientele were pretty similar across these cities in the county. So there were a lot of variables kind of eliminated so they could really just focus on this one change within this small community. Right. And down the peninsula and into the San Jose area, it's an expensive area to live. And so if you're working in a restaurant at a minimum wage, you're probably rooming with other people, maybe living with your parents. I don't know. It's a difficult situation to be able to find affordable housing, to be able to pay all your bills on a minimum wage salary. So when that wage goes up a lot, that affects a lot of those downstream considerations. But yeah, it's interesting. It's also all within that geographic area. It's nicer to know if you go somewhere, the staff are treated well and they actually enjoy being there and they're not there stressing out about finances and childcare. And also I like the part about the independent restaurants because now I'm thinking about going to Olive Garden versus a mom and pop pizza joint and thinking about the difference. Yeah, absolutely. So we have a lot of say when it comes to where we spend our money, but it seems like there's even more to be said about kind of the wider spread rules that can be placed on how work is valued. And there's benefit potentially to everyone. I like benefits. What about benefits based on just stepping on your floor? Right? Okay. By tap dancing? Could be by tap dancing. Could just be by walking across your hallway to your kitchen. Researchers are designing the sustainable electricity generating flooring of the future out of wood. Now wood itself usually is not electricity carrying or electricity generating. It's triboelectric properties are very slim in general. However, researchers love to change things about the world. So let engineers have a little go at it. And suddenly you find that your floors when you walk at them could actually create electricity. They have created something like a laminate flooring in which they're using a spruce wood and it they've through experiment determined if you cut it a particular way it produces or it allows more electricity to be generated then if you cut it another way. So cutting it on the on the length as opposed to on through the girth is is it affects the triboelectric properties of the spruce wood and when the wood is treated and in their abstract they call it functionalizing the wood when they treat it with certain chemicals they are able to create a positive and a negative charge that allows two sides of this laminate flooring to come together and into contact every time you take a step and in so produce electricity that could light your house no no no no hang on a second what do you mean no no no no well I like I love the like if that was true but isn't like the problem physics like isn't there like like a human being on like one of those stationary bikes going full tilt is like barely going to be able to if even power a light bulb right so they're they're wood that they were creating this laminate flooring they were able with just a a small piece of wood a little bit smaller than a piece of eight by eight and a half by eleven paper just stepping on it repeatedly it is and it is enough to not provide continuous light bulb illumination but instantaneous every time there's enough electricity to put some juice into an led and get it to charge so I was in Yosemite this past weekend and one of the cabins had this floor that generated electricity it wasn't quite this sophisticated but it looked it looked like tectonic plates they were kind of they were metal and they were on top of something that almost felt like a spring and just by walking through it was charging batteries that then were used at night to power the lights in the building so yeah so this this is something this is a much more likely application in normal structures this felt this was like probably not a da this was you know it was very experimental it was it was a building themselves yeah it was a demonstration right of kind of proof of concept but um yeah this is I love this idea I love the idea of using the natural structure of a building to do what we need it to do right and part of the the design of this of this hopefully eventual product is that by using wood it would also be be absorbing some of the carbon dioxide that's in the atmosphere because plants trees are a carbon sink so you're able to store carbon dioxide in the flooring material additionally it they can make it look warm and inviting you know hardwood floors people like to have and I don't think it would be quite as much of a springy effect as the floor that you're talking about but yeah so eventually could imagine the sustainable house of the future having triboelectric flooring that's actually made from wood I engineered wood but I should have fingers crossed that this is produced on such a scale that we get it out to resource poor areas because it's like we got these cool innovations and they're like hey I can afford you know high-tech x y and z or I want to see them in apartment buildings because that would be hilarious to hear people like just pounding at night trying to get lights turned on okay I need to I need to run my refrigerator right you get your kids to run back and forth down the hallway I was just thinking like yeah uh when you go to the playground oh we could just run around the house all day Justin did you have another story here uh I can uh oh yeah yeah let's do it uh this is a new study finds evidence of beer drinking 9 000 years ago in southern China and as always when they find something from the past they assume it was part of a ritual some sort to honor the day which you don't you're like nope they probably just liked drinking beers is this the interpretation we're gonna get this is the thing it's just like it's like oh this looks like ritualistic behavior of some sort like okay like so is going to a bar I mean uh so is going showing up to a bowling alley on a weekly basis to try to get one of those amazing trophies that Blair has back there somewhere like like what isn't like a ritual thing or something like I don't know but they don't use it in modern context they only use it in ancient context which is why I'm always annoyed by it however this is still an amazing story despite the fact uh that I'm annoyed by that little bit so this they found these ancient pots and uh sort of a huge mound of dirt that was 80 meters by 50 meters three meters above ground level and it had a trench around it which is sort of interesting because that's very much reminds me of like ancient Celtic sites that they find in Britain that are much much more recent but uh this was found in a place called quietau there was no residential structures on the site but there were burial mounds that contained the burial chambers that contained two human skeletons and they had many many many pottery pits with high quality pottery vessels there and a lot of them were intact a lot of them looked like the paint was still good they were actually pretty amazing some had some abstract designs on them and uh sort of the side note to the study that's looking at that it analyzed what the contents might have been they also think this is some of the earliest known painted pottery on the planet and pointing out that no pottery of this kind has been found at any other sites dating to this time period research team analyzed different types of pottery different sizes they found that a lot of the sizes were easily held in one hand so less likely then to be a storage vessel type of a thing which then got them to thinking well what were they drinking so they started to analyze what they could of the the residue within the vessels they found microfossil residues of starch uh they found residue of fungi they extract some stuff from the interior the pots put it through these analyzers and basically everything they found are consistent with the residues for what would be a beer fermentation the things that are not found naturally in soil or in other artifacts unless they had contained alcohol at some point so nine thousand years ago rice was also one of the they think one of the things along with some sort of tuber some potato we type thing uh was utilized sort of interesting this is southern china is the southern china is sort of the where the revolution of maize rice sorry not maize uh rice took place 10,000 up to 6,000 years ago is sort of that revolution of agriculture in one of the largest early scales it's founding fundamental pieces of modern civilization in fact but this at 9,000 years ago is so far back that it wouldn't necessarily have been this is so early into the domestication of rice that people would have still been hunter-gatherers researchers do think though they kind of posit something kind of fun which is that the there might be a a connection there might be a correlation between people using rice early on to make alcohol gathering around and becoming social to make the alcohol and then like hey you know if we grew like a lot of this we could make a lot we could have socials every night we could do this all the time we wouldn't have to wait to like a ritual thing happen we could just always have rice and then it turned out you could eat it too which turned you could do other stuff with it and then society formed yeah it's interesting how long ago it is i'm wondering um i know that we reported previously also that uh china has one of the its word for cannabis or weed it goes back thousands and thousands of years as well so um there's a there's a rich history and human cultivation of a variety of crops that are still with us today for entertainment ritual ritual i'm fascinated by the trial and error that probably happened here because like you know when i think about fermentation and these guys just getting drunk off random liquids i mean how many times did that go wrong how many times was it methane someone was like or methanol and they're like oh my god i'm blind and then the other time they're like this is this is awesome we're lit let's go get more rice and like the discovery marijuana are you just running around and smoking random things until one just clicked i my guess my guess is you were just gathering uh stuff to put on the campfire and then one night like one night you picked that you picked the one plant you're like oh we gotta have another campfire let's do this again like mammoth shows up we were too busy laughing the mammoth is like why are these humans like dizzy and not paying attention like bro mammoth but they do point out they do point out like the early stages of the fermentation in the rice rice gets a very sweet flavor as it's uh as it's sort of lightly fermenting and so it could have been it could have been the taste initially like you know it's sort of a sweeter more unique the sugars are getting unlocked by the enzymes and maybe that's sort of the initial attraction and then later on you let it go a little further and then you do start to get the alcohol for me you do start to get the intoxication there's another reason to like it and a lot of a lot of the a lot of of course the the open air has a yeast or fungi that can help that fermentation process but they seem to think in this one that the that they may have actually cultivated fungi for this um because of the amounts of fungi that were present they think might have actually been introduced which is a whole other than whole that's like not an accident yeah forget discovering from a day now you've got my biologists out there harvesting spores like okay or just having them and growing them in their vessels their pots right and having and just be knowing that these pots are good for making these things that we get these results my final study for this part of the show is about a paper published on monday in the journal nature communications researchers at the mckelvey school of engineering in washington university st louis have used synthetic chemistry to get bacteria to create muscle protein it's one of three muscle proteins it is a muscle protein called titan and titan is a big protein and one of it's like the biggest protein and instead of harvesting muscles from animals they want to harvest muscle from bacteria to make our clothes we've talked about using spider silk and being able to synthesize silk from spiders to be able to create create very strong fibers but the idea also is that you can have a very strong resilient fabric produced from a bacterial muscle protein i mean it's not muscle protein in bacteria to begin with they've put the muscle the gene to create the muscle protein into the bacteria and this synthetic muscle could potentially go on to create fibers that could be used for creating stronger shoes for creating your athletic well athletic wear maybe creating a stronger more resilient kevlar so the idea is to use the innovation of biology to be able to help create the products of our future to make our future would you wear a t-shirt your your next athletic t-shirt it's made out of muscle fibers that would be a true muscle shirt wouldn't it yeah i definitely would except i think at least for a while this is gonna cost like five thousand dollars for one t-shirt easy at the it's sure in the beginning but we all know uh i mean does it do muscle stuff i don't understand why it would be muscle tissue it wouldn't be muscle tissue but you could use the muscle protein to create long fibers and those fibers could be woven to create a very resilient fabric i mean aside from the obvious cool branding with the fact that it's like bacterial protein if it had any eco-friendly component i could see that being like massive marketing i mean i have a shirt that's made out of seaweed i have another sweatshirt made out of recycled ocean plastic and like you see that in a store and you're like oh my god i'm cool and i can tell people about this and i can post it on instagram and everyone's like you're saving the planet so i think that's that i'm curious about that i'm curious about how much it takes how much energy it takes to create this bacteria then make the muscle then create the shirt then like you know do all that stuff that no one talks about i think that's a really interesting question because we know that some of these um uh the blue green algae farms some of the the companies that are growing bacteria culturing bacteria and huge vats to create create not clothing but also food and all sorts of proteins and various products now they are very water heavy but it can be managed and the whole system from start to finish can be much less energy intensive than say the cotton industry and what that and what that entails currently and i'd be a lot more in favor of water that was reclaimed from yeast or bacillus than i would from uh you know petrol chemicals and i would say fresh water if you're already tooling around in there just uh change genetically engineer them to be able to do what they need to do with salt water then you're fine it's exactly because so much salt water let's use that the salt can be a problem salty protein shirt yeah just don't get rid of the salt it's all good oh everyone thank you so much for being a part of this week in science this week if you are enjoying the show be sure to tell a friend today get them to listen all right i want to come on back right now and introduce our guest a little bit more what to say a few more things so i briefly introduced dr petal earlier in this show but dr petal is a tv producer host and physician he's a correspondent for the bay area abc news host of the nova science podcast nova now and parent logic on pbs which is a new program welcome to the show and thank you so much for joining us today alone thank you for having me and for the wonderful introduction i basically just like to run my mouth and as long as there's evidence behind what i'm reporting on i will run my mouth freely let's talk about all the science but right now i want to talk about you so can you tell us a little bit about your background and what brought you into medicine and then specializing in pediatrics and then on to television screens how did that given it because i'm i'm just in order to avoid this being like a two hour ted talk i'll just be quick with it so i'm originally from arizona i went to medical school at the university of arizona go wildcats bear down for anyone out there who gets that um i did residency in pediatrics and one of the biggest reasons why i chose pediatrics i know everyone out there is like oh kids are so cute that's not why i did for two reasons number one the intellectual reason is in children the differential so the type of disease the type of condition that could cause a symptom is really wide and it's fascinating so i'll give you an example if someone called me right now and said hey i got a 15 month old coming to the emergency department and he's breathing heavy i don't know if it's because of an infection because of asthma because of a congenital issue because of an injury or because the kids swallowed a lego inhale the lego i should say so there's a lot of you know kids aren't going to tell you what's wrong with them they're not going to point and say it hurts here and so there's a there's an intellectual curiosity that was met by pediatrics and i now work as a hospitalist in pediatrics so i only take care of hospitalized children sounds morbid but children do great and it's it's an extremely intellectually challenging and rewarding career the other reason why is i have a lot of empathy for this population obviously children don't do it to themselves children don't choose the zip code that they are born in they don't choose a situation around them they don't choose the external influences that push them into a certain path towards living a healthy life and it's motivation enough for me to get up in the morning and fight for them that sounds very preachy like a hallmark card but i mean it and you know as far as communication you know what's really fascinating is when i i guess this isn't fascinating this is common sense when i first started in residency i was idealistic and i thought everyone out there is going to see that data and they're going to hear what their health professionals tell them and they're going to make the right choices that is not true i'm saying this to everyone now and they're like yeah we've seen this play out in a terrible fashion during the pandemic but this is back in 2012 you know kind of at the the spawning of the misinformation machine that is social media and because of all that i got really fascinated in journalism i went to abc news in new york i did an internship the rest is history and that's how i slowly started to mel the career with being involved in science communication journalism reporting with still being a hospital-based pediatrician so you're into the the the miscommunication of things the misunderstanding of things and what is it though that's the communicating of it what do you want to be able to what why is it important to you to get those messages out well i kind of rushed when i talked about the the fascinating with communication because yes i think it is important to teach people how to be a more empowered consumer of knowledge like i like what jesson said at the top about like science is our guiding light you know i wanted to really be there and help people not only read or listen or watch a funny engaging story but also learn something and then learn what to do with that information like what's step two like i read this fun buzzfeed article with the top 10 funny things from a disney movie cool what am i going to do with that info and so i think that's where the next step with health information was which is what pushed me into it and i i also oftentimes look at the content that i work on i look at the content i consume and and what i wanted to learn and it's about relatability it's about telling people about a health story or new guidelines or a new study and speaking to them and communicating to them as if we're sitting in a bar next to each other and we've been friends for our entire life like this is the information i got from my mentors the advice i got from them early on in my career and that's what motivates me it's like everyone out there regardless of what you believe we also have something in common we're curious creatures we're mammals sometimes people go down the wrong path towards bs other people go down the path towards evidence-based and it's all about finding people where they are and trying to meet them there rather than assuming that they're going to like catch up to some mythical land of facts right there's a study that came out like this week that seems common sense but it's like oh people who feel like they're intuitive about information are more likely to be caught up in misinformation than people who are reflective about that information and so it's like oh but at the same time you have to realize that these are different types of people and you can't just talk to everybody the same but it's i sort of mentioned it a little bit in the disclaimer but it's something i i truly believe like if you look at the the the people who are into something along the lines of the ancient aliens or any of these other things they go down a very complicated road of trying to put disparate pieces of information together it's like like it's just oh gosh if i could give them real data right if i give them some real data to work with they could actually produce some they might actually find something if they were working in in an actual data set by but by using makity up data sets misinformation as the only information that they're feeding off of that's feeding their brains curiosity they don't have a chance to do anything but follow that to its maybe predestined conclusion maybe it's a planted thing or maybe it's just something that's even further out of the the sphere of what anybody would conceive like like like we've been like again like you pointed out too we've been seeing this throughout the pandemic people looking for an alternate reality to just the data that's right there already i think people want answers you know and i i try to relate to some of my colleagues who are so frustrated by this like we should be and i try to make an analogy i'm like when's the last time your phone broke on you or you know your sound your sound machine i sound like i'm talking from the ancient time like your vinyl player your record player something wasn't working right like you want an answer you won't like hop on google and i want an answer immediately it's very difficult to hear i don't know when i call tech support and i'm like my headphone jack is not working in my laptop true story and i was like give me an answer and so like i apply that when i when i think about times i've been in the hospital and i've been taking care of someone with a complex diagnosis and this parent is on google and they're like well this is it right here i'm like where'd you find that information from and it's like some hocus pocus health guru on instagram and i'm like yeah because this person has an answer for you you will have to buy their special potion but like they have an answer and i think a lot of people fell into that trap during the pandemic they're like oh yeah there's an answer it's a bioterrorism thing and yes there's an answer i can be cured of all this by ibermectin like people just want to jump from point A to point B and i think the beautiful thing about science is that it teaches you curiosity and it teaches you how to say i have no idea but i'm gonna figure out how to find out yeah and there's a bit of having to be comfortable with that uncertainty which is very hard for the human brain to handle yes egotistical doctors especially your stanford bio says that you're on the board for the association for healthcare and social media healthcare social media tell me about this this sounds like a fascinating organization how what do they do and why are you interested in helping them i love that a h a h sm is getting a nod anyone out there check us out hsm.org but basically as a lot of people know there's a lot of healthcare professionals on social media and there are people masquerading as healthcare professionals as well and when we first came together you know the founder dr austin chang was a gastroenterologist in philadelphia you know he brought a bunch of people together from different specialties different parts of the country different backgrounds demographics and said hey we really need to just get together and just talk about what we can do to teach people better practices as health professionals better things to do on social media better ways to reach out and connect with people who are consuming this information but then on the other hand we wanted to teach people out there how to identify trustworthy sources on social media so the very first campaign we launched to kind of test the waters out there was hashtag verify it was this verify health or verify health care one of those hashtags but the point was is the very first campaign we launched fall 2018 we wanted to show people a way to try to identify the source of information of who is who's post your reading and look down and look at that person yeah what was that oh no i was uh right like yeah who is actually saying this yes that i'm reading exactly and so you know that's how ahsm really started is trying to just get better information out there teach healthcare professionals how to make good engaging relatable content but then also create a better consumer and teach people like let's fact check what we're reading online and fact check this person but then it kind of blossomed and we found more healthcare professionals finding creative ways to use social media yes combating misinformation is really important but so is raising awareness or building a practice or collaborating with other healthcare professionals with networking there's also specific things you can do with each platform you know because twitter is very different than twitch which is different than facebook which is different than instagram and and very different than tiktok which is like an alien species whole another world yeah so that's that's that's really what we do and it's it's been evolving so much it's been an absolute honor to be with it we have some really cool collaborations happening and it's it's cool just to have like a kind of a place for people to come together we host these webinars and we've even been taking on some topics like for example we were talking about racism in healthcare we were doing that over a zoom last year and having people talk about not only what's actually happening in healthcare but how healthcare professionals can address it and what we can do to reach out to people who reach out to us on social media i think it's so interesting i'm i'm really glad that there are people working on this because i feel like science as a whole medical science climate science science as a whole has been playing catch up with the social media game for 100 and part of the problem is that as people interested in the legitimacy of science you have you have to stay true to reality and facts and not everyone else on social media has to do that so you have to kind of tip toe this line where you engage and you're you're you're kind of in the moment but you also have to be true to the scientific process yes and so the two things i'll say back to that is the scientific process takes longer than making a false claim on social media like it's very easy it was very easy for alex jones and info wars to come out and say i'm going to sell coronavirus fighting toothpaste and then all of a sudden that spreads like wildfire and it takes time to catch up but also and this is going to be a on my hot take number two for the podcast i can't decide if the net benefit of social media has been a good thing or a bad thing for information because i talk to people out there and they're like well it's good because now we can debunk misinformation i was like yeah that was spread by social media yeah like i don't know like i i think that we're turning the tide finally i think the pandemic has pushed a lot of people to take a step back and say where is information coming from but i can't tell you i felt that way from 2010 until yeah you know 2018-19 and i think there were a lot of people in science and also in the health industry in medicine who probably were like is it really my place to be to be correcting things to be saying things i mean i'm i'm going to be a scientist i need to work in the lab or i'm just in the hospital helping people right now in this social media world now we realize especially with the pandemic that we have to get out in front of people and credibly rebut the misinformation i'm so thrilled yes you said that dr kiki i'm i'm like people almost you're watching us on youtube you can't see me like this bumping that comment but i think there's a lot of scientists out there who for whatever reason don't want to get on social media or they might have imposter syndrome or they may say like hey this isn't my lane i can't talk about that and that was another big pillar of our mission statement when we were talking together with hsm is everyone out there has a place everyone out there has a specific passion or a process or they have they have their own ability to kind of speak out raise awareness and do something on social media whatever it is whatever platform it is whatever they're working on there is a place for everyone i think that was that's kind of a beautiful thing to watch unfold over the past couple years absolutely agree with that one of the things that you're also doing though is your podcasting and you're working with nova which nova science now is this wonderful wonderful brand going back years but tell us a bit about the the podcast the nova now podcast and what you're doing there nova now the science behind the headlines that's our tag line yeah so i i i grew up watching nova so i had a i already had a huge affinity for that brand and what we basically do is we're looking it's very similar i will say we're a similar family as twist where we're looking at what's happening in headlines we do a deep dive into one story every two weeks we look at what is trending right now on headlines and science and you know it could be everything from the science of fear which we did last halloween to science in the courtroom which we did last year till we've done two episodes on coven now one is related to kind of the development and the manufacturing of the vaccine we just did one about variance and it's all over the place but what's awesome is with each one we're doing a deep dive and we're interviewing experts and we're having just a very real conversation very pointed conversation so people can understand like okay this is a science topic that's happening out there what is it what is it how does it actually affect me and for me personally it feels like feels like i'm stealing money because i'm getting paid to have scientific conversations and learn the last i think this is non-disclosure but the episode dropping this week is about lithium batteries and i'm sorry that episode already came out the episode dropping this week is about reopening schools and you know keeping kids safe and what are really going to do the episode last episode was about lithium batteries and how it relates to biden's infrastructure bill so super cool there's something for everyone i'm plugging myself now but everyone should check it out wherever you get your podcasts absolutely i mean i have to say you know our experience on this show also i think it's a very similar thing where it's like wait i get to talk about science okay i get to talk with scientists and learn things every week awesome yeah like i'm like it's it's great it's fun it's great yeah what is the what i mean lithium batteries very serious subject but also can be a lot of fun to learn about the background of that reopening schools that's a bit more serious but if you were to think about like your most fun that you've had in a project or an episode what do you what would you say it was whoa put me on the spot now is this an episode related to nova now or can it be broader yeah so if you if you want to take it to another program uh that's awesome that that works as well but something that just you were like this was so much fun like you could even be a guest on another show and that could be the experience that was the most fun you've ever had oh man so there i who okay so i'm gonna give you i'm gonna very rapid fire give you three okay so one thing that we always do on the nova now podcast is this is not related to the three by the way i'm just taking more time one thing we always do on the nova now podcast is i want to i want to make sure that people see a social component to science also so regarding lithium batteries and electric cars we talked about equity we talked about being able to what do we do in the future to make sure everyone has an electric car same topic showed up in this in the education episode now back to your question three quick things off the top of my head rapid fire in order to test out and demonstrate the science of lying on april fools day 2016 with abc news we played a poker game with whoopie golberg and had a an expert on poker tells with us to actually watch whoopie play and then we were like interviewing her and i was talking to her about hand gestures she was making that was amazing that was like science in motion then another thing that we did for nova we worked on a crisper documentary and i went out to a very very incredible farm with uc davis so there were actually there's a crisper cow named cosmo there was another cow that was in utero and i did a trans rectal ultrasound to check out this cow who's five months this this cow who's like five months in five months gestational age so basically my entire arm i don't know if anyone here is on a trans rectal on a cow before i can't say that i have no my entire arm all the way in so is that how it has to be done with a cow that the ultrasound is from the inside yeah it's from the inside yeah it's crazy because like in humans you just do it like right below right right on the outside yeah but you have to go inside seems like you could like create like i don't know some sort of other extension of an like not a real arm that you could it's so it's crazy because like from the outset maybe my hand was in there and the minute i hit like the gut the the large cattle veterinarian was like now go down so i went down and i felt this like it felt like a massive water balloon and he's like awesome he's like you're there right now and then i felt this like something punching my hand he's like that's the fetus wow i'm the last one it was adorable the last one the last one i'll mention because i think this might be a segue but this is proving to people that science is everywhere we did an episode last i mentioned this earlier by the science of fear and we talked with a fully artist and emu award-winning fully artist and talk to her about ways you create sounds for horror movies and walk through like some horror movie scenes and the ways they create sound and how that plays a trick on your brain and how it actually gets you involved in it and that that stuff is so cool to me so the the halloween episode stood out the fear of the science of fear and like how we actually want to be immersed in a horror movie we want to get scared i want to believe everything and have in the movie is real not like that that was just super cool yeah if you ever if you ever want to not be afraid during a horror movie just you know put on some like some comedic music or you know just play a laugh track every time play a laugh track exactly yeah change the tone entirely unless it was like ironically laughing then it could be scary so the poker thing though the poker thing it's up because i have like a hundred tells that are and they're all obvious depending on what i can you could tell what two cards are my down cards when i look at them based on tells just because i'm just i can't hide anything so when i play poker i don't look at the down cards i just play on luck i don't like look at the cards and strategize i wait until there's like a whole bunch of other cards out before i even know what those are otherwise i there's no chance i'm like curious what your poker record is it's actually pretty amazing actually if you don't use your own judgment poker by just the pure odds of the card hands you're dealt actually is really good you actually i've done way better than i ever did thinking i knew what i was doing sounds like a study who needs a postdoc yeah all right so let's go back to the serious subject of covid and um and you brought up the fact that you're you have an episode coming out this week related to returning kids to school and as a pediatrician i'm i'm a parent myself and my i sent my child to school in a space helmet today we had and i'm serious about this i have i shared pictures on my facebook of this full head helmet that has hepa filters and fans because i don't trust anybody but i had to send him back to school um so as a pediatrician how what what do you think of the effects of covid 19 on children loaded so i first of all i respect your son and the the buzz light your get up he's using to keep himself safe so the covid 19 has affected children in so many different ways so in terms of like directly affecting children we have long debunked what we heard in 2020 where children are and i'm doing air quotes immune to the virus they're not you know they they just they tend to do a little bit better against it for reasons that are currently being debated but we've seen plenty of kids unfortunately hospitalized that number's only rising is only is continuing to rise i've personally seen kids in hospitalized i've seen kids in the icu i've seen kids with the inflammatory condition m isc and you know right now it's we don't necessarily know that the delta variant is is more severe than a previous variant but we do know that at a higher number you just have more kids we're getting sick and that's yeah awful and kids are also under 12 are not eligible to get the vaccine so the direct effect on kids has been has been terrible we're seeing this happening we're seeing people spreading this to children i've taken care of newborns who have had covid before it's just the entire situation is is awful we need to do better to in protecting our kids but we also have to yeah pause so sorry i'm so sorry i just need to pause it there for a second because i think it went by quick and i mean maybe i maybe it's it's the delta variant we're hearing a lot about it's affecting kids we've got a bunch of kids in the hospital there's there's school kids going to the hospital and great numbers but it you're saying it's not necessarily that the the delta is more severe when a kid encounters it it's just so much more higher transmissibility correct so we don't have we don't have the yeah you're right we don't have that we don't have the clear cut data yet showing that kids are going to get a more severe disease disease course but when you have a virus that is as contagious and transmissible as a delta variant that can give you a thousand times more viral load than the alpha variant you're going to get more kids infected especially now that we're reopening and half the country is like anti-mask you know it's just more kids are inevitably going to get hit with it the one thing that doesn't get talked about and now it is but not it wasn't getting talked about enough is long hauler covid which we have seen in kids we've seen that long hauler covid in kids and adults who were asymptomatic it tested positive for whatever reason you know maybe from an exposure they got tested but it had no symptoms and then i'm seeing like varsity basketball players who have chronic knee pain and chest pain and these kids are like 16 years old so that's happening as well but the one thing we can never state is the indirect effect that the pandemic has had on kids as well you know a lot of kids out there have lost a parent or lost a guardian or a loved one or a friend poverty has struck in a lot of kids across the world the racial disparity that we've seen happen you know kids from communities of color kids from lower social economic groups have been disproportionately affected and don't even get me started on what the loss of a school year has done for kids and you know how many more kids we're seeing present to emergency departments with mental illness like we have failed our children children of the world and such i mean we've been filling them for decades let's be real but we really dropped the ball in protecting our kids in the past year and a half yeah and um the mental health aspect it's something that i think we're going to be seeing the fallout from for probably several years that's probably something that's going to stick with our kids similar to the long haul issues but for different reasons and you know i guess if there's a silver lining because there has to be silver linings things we need hope we need we need good we need good headlines too it's that there is a lot more awareness but what we want to see happen from the awareness are points of intervention so yes you know we can tell people all day long like there is an increase in mental illness here's to look out what to look out for but health care access is also a huge issue we still also have 30 to 40 million americans without insurance and so we just want to make sure that the the mental health services are there as well and that's something that you know the biden the white house just announced millions of dollars going into a couple programs for screening for training for mental health intervention and so hopefully that plays a really big role in what we see in the next couple years with the the hidden mental illness um pandemic next couple years so i've been offering uh some free medical advice on this show for right on right on late on me and i thought maybe it's time to run it by a doctor here we go here we go i'm excited for it like uh my claim has been that the best thing that we could do that the thing that would end and cure this virus was is if we just take eight weeks off of everything would that actually could that actually be a could that actually do it in theory could have and we talked about the you're so you're not wrong and this was brought up several times last year hey did you both hear that it's the first time on this okay so i just want that first and we can we flip that i already ruined the this this was brought up multiple times last year where people talked about in march last year if we shut down the entire country and shut down everything for two weeks you know we could have we could have greatly stunted the spread of the virus or it was brought up again in fall before the holiday season and there was a reason when the big white house outbreak happened when president trump and everyone at the rose party was uh contaminated all that crap taiwan had less cases than the white house and it's because some of these countries that were able to actually you know i mean taiwan's an island but places that were actually able to lock down and take it seriously we saw it we saw what happened they had no cases we saw this with new zealand as well and so now the reality check though is that we would never get all americans on the same page our leadership wasn't even on the same page yeah and that difficulty is what that that's the crux of the problem right it is so so intervention the problem is people the one thing i the one thing i will say is the way we could kind of find a happy medium is with with more screening more testing and contact tracing if we could do that you could selectively shut down different that's the thing that blows me away is that contact tracing we were like oh it's too hard when we had next to no cases we had almost no cases and it was i would have to call like 50 people no that's too hard that's too many phone calls and then people don't want to download any apps there was a company i believe the company was in ireland that had base out of ireland they had a startup in an app where people could download and you could you could use it that way but then everyone's like no government's going to take my data and like it just you have a phone already what do you think about your data so this is the other thing i'm wondering is for all of these children that can't be vaccinated yet who we are forcing to return to school what about just testing everybody constantly at these schools i mean like we're doing this in all of hollywood all those people are getting daily tests yeah pretty much so yes yep why i know it's not very productive to ask why not but what if what if we did that would that be helpful yes i mean how could it not be helpful you're basically identifying you're identifying positive cases before the positive cases have a chance to turn into two three four five six seven eight ten the the story that everyone was talking about this past weekend in marinn county you know we had one unvaccinated unmasked teacher yeah infected 12 other children had this teacher tested gotten a cova test and then you know stayed home those kids wouldn't have been infected now is it possible those kids will not have been infected others totally that's how it happened so like there's a very strong case for randomly testing and screening unvaccinated teachers and children so basically everyone under 12 or the 50 percent 50 to 60 percent of kids age 12 to 15 who haven't yet gotten fully vaccinated yeah and there is there have been a couple of research studies that have looked into it and they've done modeling to determine various levels of testing and it from what i've seen it looks like you know if you tested every three to four days or even once a week that would be sufficient it wouldn't even have to be every day it would end as as people can learn when we drop this episode on the no pun now podcast the science behind the headlines is there's other things schools can do as well that schools should be doing we obviously vaccines and masks are paramount importance but so is ventilation yeah and you know everyone i've talked about here schools are doing different things like lunchtime outdoors staggering classes all that stuff all of it is is parts of the layers of of protection to make sure our kids are back in school in person optimal learning environment but that they're kept safe yep as safe so we'll put them outdoors in which in the central valley right now means you put them outdoors in a hundred degree heat with a hazardous air quality right all the fires like there's no no we put them indoors especially with that with the air quality which is such a tragedy right now and we have air purifiers there HEPA air purifiers air ventilation systems with merv 13 filters yes here's all the filtration we need to keep moving though yeah we're gonna move along quickly i just want to add up all the time in the testing centers spent getting in line setting up the thing going in getting the test getting back waiting for your result all the time setting up these air movers and these these ventilation devices all the time spent looking for the mask putting on the mask all the time that we spent if you just add it all up we're basically at my eight weeks of just not doing anything which is also easier to do accomplish i think you should start a blog start a blog or something called eight weeks of doing nothing this copy right copy right there right now yep you have a book to write justin eight weeks to freedom we can get there people all right i'm gonna wrap this interview up right now and we have i have one more big question for you a look but i want to hold on to it for leave it for the end of the show but really so you can think about it for a little bit are you gonna stick you're gonna stick with us until i'm gonna stick with you i mean this is this is heavy i don't even know what direction this question is gonna go in now i just for what if you had a moment to just get people to understand something give them a message a health related a medical message a scientific message what do you really want people to know what do you want to tell them do i have to keep it related to coven no okay so anything this is anything dream your dream message my dream message is that prevention and living a healthy lifestyle preventing disease is more accessible and cheaper than actually treating and having this downstream issue when you actually have a debilitating condition prevention comes in the form of things like getting sleep managing your stress exercising regularly you know eating healthy if you can and things like vaccinations and masks which are way better than winding up in a crowded hospital and getting a bunch of ivy medications and i wish that everyone out there would just start to prioritize prevention and not just the consumer not just the public but also everyone out there who are making decisions about our healthcare system and doing something better about social determinants of health and making sure everyone in the world has access to ways access to ways to actually prevent disease and live healthier more empowered lifestyles that was more of like a end preaching note and not necessarily a message but i'm going to keep it and take it i like it yeah i think i think i think we can run with that for sure thank you for telling us all about your various programs and the things that you're working on we're going to take a very quick break and come back with blairs animal corner for some animal stories thank you for watching twist we hope you that you enjoyed this interview if you are enjoying twists every week weekend week out please take a moment to head over to twist.org and click on our patreon link that'll lead you to our patreon community where you can join as a supporter at a level of your choice so ten dollars a month a dollar a month even or a thousand dollars a month whatever you are able to do we appreciate your support because you're helping us bring twists and bring science and curiosity to more and more people every single week we really can't do this without you thank you for your support and now it's time for this week in sciences one and only blairs animal corner what you got blair oh my goodness i have a couple of um very crafty salty animal stories tonight i'm pretty excited they're both kind of anecdotal accidental discoveries in the animal kingdom which is always fun um this first one is uh from a team of researchers from australia canada and the us and they kind of just back in 2015 happened across some octopuses throwing things at other octopuses they're like that's that's very odd well we've heard about the octopus tool use and we've heard about the you know amazing interesting skills of octopuses yes we've heard about octopuses punching fish we've heard fish yes the big thing is releasing their their ink cloud yes doing that as well absolutely are they throwing shoes like what what are they throwing and well they're in the cases they saw back in 2015 it was mostly silt so it's basically just like the the dirt on the bottom of the ocean that they were kind of just grabbing globs of and throwing at other octopuses and so they they wanted to explore this further and see what was really going on so they went back to the same site which was in jervis bay off the coast of australia there are huge numbers of sydney octopuses there and so they were able to make recordings and study them carefully to see what was going on turns out female octopuses were consistently engaging in object throwing in most cases that was the silt we were talking about before sometimes shells sometimes they moved material around that was in their way or it looked like they were building a nest so there were some different types of throwing happening but in the minority less often they actually saw what really looked like clear attempts by females to throw things at a nearby male most often when he was trying to mate with her so they would go it's taking the reaction to the woo woo hey baby and just i'm gonna throw some dirt at you yeah absolutely not not now leave me alone now but yes and so the they would grab their material they would hold it under their body and then they placed the material over their siphon as you're talking about kiki um so that then they could use the siphon to push out that jet of water to kind of propel the item so it's more than just them throwing it with their tentacles they actually they they put it in front of the siphon so that it can kind of get slingshotted out from their body and they they found that the way that they were doing it was different depending on what they were trying to achieve so when they were throwing things that they were trying to get rid of or redistribute and there weren't males around they used their two front tentacles but when there were suitors that were bothering them and they wanted to tell them to scram they would use their first and second tentacles instead so it seemed like at least in their in their processes they were picking a different technique whether they were trying to just get rid of something or if they were trying to to tell a male octopus to buzz off and in uh in one case which i love a female actually tossed a shell like a frisbee using one of her tentacles nice yeah um and so they oh and in another case this is great a female through silt at the same male 10 times he could not catch a hint persistence though right octopus soap opera yes absolutely be gone um and so in all of these cases of the females throwing things at the males they did not see any evidence of males retaliating retaliating by tossing things back or responding really in any other any other way than retreat essentially wow so this is a female only behavior and it's directed at males and it's basically i'm not interested yes which one of my other favorite things about octopus mating if we're gonna just get into this another multiple is that yeah there's there's a lot about it that's great so for one you know you think about a lot of animal mating is there's a lot more physical contacts than these guys have normally the male will use his hexacondas his specialized arm to pass a little sperm packet and just kind of hand it to the female it's just a little it's here here this is for you and what i love is that the females will take it and sometimes they will use it to fertilize their eggs and sometimes they'll just eat it so it's like a huge gamble because they're just like oh thank you for this energy that you use to make all of these little sperm i'm just going to use it as protein thank you so much bye so it's i yeah so it separately that's insult to injury but these ladies don't even want to give them the time of day so it really is painting a picture to me that the female octopuses are really in charge of sexual selection in this case which i love and yeah in some species we we've learned that various species there's a difference in the choosiness and it's often been suggested that females are choosy but it is actually that case for the the octopus definitely yes so i can't wait to see more research on this i want to know if there are lots of octopus species that throw things if they have kind of handedness and how they throw which is wild as i love it give me more it's so smart they're so smart so smart i i love cephalopods they're like that they're the gift that keeps on giving they always have something great to teach us because they have so many arms yes okay tell me about let's move on to birds now yes yes cockatoos they they have um they're smart we've talked about cockatoos are smart they're in the parrot family and they have been observed in the past using tools but this also kind of a happenstance this is a study with goffins cockatoos and they were found to to be crafting and utilizing like their very own toolbox basically sequential tool use let me explain what that means so this happened when um there were ecologists working with wild but captive birds in indonesia so they would just grab them for a few days and then release them again he just kind of noticed one of them using a tool in the enclosure in their research facility so he decided to kind of lean into this and try some new stuff and so what they provided the birds with papayas and young coconuts and then they did nothing there was no tool use no nothing they'd play with sticks they'd bite off twigs they didn't really use them to eat with but then one day the lead researcher noticed fruit uh fruit on the ground with cockatoo bite marks but it was not either of the food types that they've been providing the papayas or the coconuts they identified this fruit it was egg shaped as the fruit of the sea mango tree and it is about the size of a small avocado it's toxic to humans and the fruit contains a reddish pulp which is surrounded by a hard pit that encases small nutritious seeds so it's very layered and getting to those seeds is really difficult even for a parrot that has like 10 000 pounds of psi in their beak so then they watched in amazement as a male cockatoo bit away the main skin okay great that's normal parrot stuff then grabbed a branch from a tree inside the aviary with a few quick bites turned it into a wedge shaped tool held the fruit with his left foot perched on his right and used his tongue to fit the wedge into the fissure of the pit pride the pit open next grabbed a splinter another little piece of wood crafted it into a sharp narrow tool used that to pierce the interior skin protecting the seeds and then made a third tool from another bit of wood biting into the flattened strip that he then used to spoon out the seeds so basically you used a protocol yes and ran down that list of order of operation yes wow that's impressive what do i need that very scientific right yes so how do they figure this out is this something they're born knowing is something they teach each other was this a fluke but what we do know is that in this group of i think it was 15 birds only two males made and used the tools all the rest of the animals all the rest of the birds were pretty young but so if they had some sort of genetic predisposition you would expect more of them than two out of 15 to do it at least at least attempts right if it was right you know practice or a simulation of doing it what might might emerge right so birds are birds are so smart i'd be sorry to sorry to add this story but i have a friend who who had an african gray the saddest grant a different bird but she told me that the bird the people who raise african grays say they get frustrated if they don't learn something new every single day yep which is wildly stimulated it's like a child you must stimulate them and give them something to learn like i'm kind of surprised by the story you know glare you just told but that at the same time i'm like no birds are legit i believe it i believe that yeah and um that's one of the things that that these sorts of stories always it gets me man is that they say this is the first time any bird has been seen creating and using a set of tools in a specific order this is a cognitively challenging behavior previously only known to humans chimpanzees and capuchin monkeys and i always kind of go like yeah but how close are we looking right have you really been paying all that much attention yeah yeah i mean we didn't even know about this this fruit that cockatoos ate that they use tools for so is it capuchin i've always been saying capuchin whoops it probably both are fine i don't but blare's worked in a zoo so i trust blare listen if it comes between blare and myself about animals i'm not the one who's right no i'm i'm gonna go ahead and guess that probably yours is more accurate and i probably have the anglicized zoo pronunciation it would be my guess but we can we can get to the bottom of it in the aftershock too if you look it up um amazing for things like this yes i love it uh but yeah so so in this case most likely this was an invention the the researchers are are positing that it was invented by cockatoos and then they kind of learn it from each other as they they get a little older and a little better with their tool making and stuff but yeah pretty unexpected surprising discovery with these guys that they have this sequential tool use they kind of make their toolbox and and attack a problem surprising but not surprising twist can give you all a toolbox of science we bring you science stories to entertain you and wet your curiosity whistle every single week if you would like to get one of our t-shirts or sweatshirts or i just got a beach towel last week and i love it it's amazing head over to twist.org click on our zazzle link all right justin want to tell us a story yeah uh okay so when it rains turns out the plants are not just getting water they might also be getting microbes out of the deal these uh rainbow microbes uh have the opportunity then to become part of the plants above ground microbial community the phyliosphere phyliosphere microbes then are being shown to protect plants from disease and other stressors so usually when we've been talking about the microbiome of plants we focus on the soil all the little symbiotic relationships between the microbes there and the roots and how they interact and provide nutrients back and forth these new findings by scientists at virginia tech university suggest that rain might actually be an important global reservoir for plant microbiome it started actually just with a pretty simple observation so they were they were doing uh microbial observations of tomato plants some that were grown in the lab and some that were grown outside and they were sort of comparing the two and they found that the outdoor tomato plants compared to those grown in the lab had a more diverse microbial load and actually were more successfully colonized by a diverse this diversity so they started with a simple question is it actually really you know is it being outdoors is it the the air is it rain is it soil that's that's getting pushed up by the so what they did was they basically created an experiment where they had lab grown tomatoes that were given rainwater that had been filtered and the water had been sterilized they used some di water totally sterile water that didn't come from the sky and they concentrated rainwater they basically took rainwater and and built up the the microbes that were that were in that rainwater because there's still very very few it's not it's not densely microbial so they controlled these outside factors they ran their experiment and they found that there it was the the ones that were that were raised up with the microbial hyper microbial rainwater not only grew better and looked healthier but they had a a nice diversity of over a hundred bacterial taxa that that weren't even in the other the other samples so it indicated that microbes in rain can successfully colonize and grow on the surface of plants and offer a benefit sort of an interesting thing because we are very now very much now focused on especially in the light of global warming having to maybe move populations of plants and and grow certain crops in areas where they may not have been grown before a lot of focus on bringing with those crops the soil microbes because that's an integral part of how a plant's survival is dependent upon what's what microbes are there for them to interact with the idea that there's this global reservoir though might help explain how plants can move locations historically over time and can sort of part of their ability to be mobile might be the fact that one of those things that they rely upon is kind of rained down from the atmosphere wherever they happen to land yeah I mean we've heard stories before about microbes making their way across the Atlantic in the winds from the Sahara over you know over to the eastern seaboard and so this it's we know there are microbes in the atmosphere so of course they would get caught in droplets and rain down and be part probably of this cycle of um the water cycle and the microbial and plant cycle fascinating yeah and I think we were talking was it just last week or the week before about how much biotech looking at my door sorry how much biotech is starting to focus on plant microbiome for agriculture industry trying to find ways because we're going to have a growing population we need to grow more food on smaller or the same amounts of land we have all these pressures we're not going to reinvent you know some of the things in the past that got us there like just freezing food was huge we'd all be starved to death if you couldn't freeze vegetables right but there's so much focus on the soil what do you do if you've got your indoor hydroponics and how do you make sure that they have the microbes that they're getting when you're not getting the rain from the outside and because we've only been studying the soil maybe there is a hugely beneficial reservoir that could actually be cultivated and sprayed upon plant surface which is the easy thing to do too it's much more difficult there's attempts to combine seeds with a microbial sort of shell so that they have the right things that they need when they start growing there's ideas about you know getting things into the soil itself but then you're talking about replacing all top soil and fighting everything else that's there there's a much more limited field of bacteria that are going to be present in rainwater and if they're having a beneficial effect that's a much more direct efficient way of producing a great outcome in crops if you can cultivate that smaller segment and actually spray it upon the leaves which is where it wants to be collect rainwater take it other places sprayed on the crops yes and yet another reason we need to pay attention to climate change yes yet another reason we need rain another and how the the change in rain in rain and where water is distributed and how that's going to affect plants yeah for sure tell us about corals Justin so this last story uh it's it's oh you know what I absolutely 100% should have used this for the good news this is this this should not too late not too late okay okay oh second second segment second segment of just good news the one good news they're really that the more you know this one's actual the actual good news there's two segments one's the good news one's the actual good news uh there is a project that is showing fantastic success the seacore international group has developed a technique that is breeding coral in a sustainable biodiverse way that's average that's able to scale up to do large scale coral seeding uh it's called crib uh which is the Caribbean uh oh gosh no where is that's not it uh where is the coral rearing in situ basins or cribs and basically they're creating a uh these sort of pond these it looks like it looks like sort of like if you threw a tarp down over a pool or a large large container but they're using all natural coral sexual breeding techniques to initiate this they're not using a whole lot of artificial uh you know some that are using electricity these other sorts of things they're basically going fundamental what do these coral need and what can they actually thrive on depend on what nutrients do they need there they're managing to be successful on a large scale to the point where they can deposit these corals down they will self and this is very important they will self adhere basically to the seafloor or to other coral installations as opposed to there's some versions of attempts at this where human divers have to go down and do they have to like like do a underwater mortaring to get coral statistic this one is self-adhesive and is able to sexually reproduce after it's left on its own so again this is one of those fun facts like that has come up on this show that i never would have guessed was a thing in reality until Blair brought it up in one of the one of her stories that coral produce 50% of the earth's oxygen and they're dying yeah which means we're going to lose the thing that makes the thing that keeps us from dying so this is this is really good news this is good news i think that the part that's tough for me though is that this this doesn't fix what's happening from climate change right so so this is an important way to kind of reduce the impact i think you forgot the segment title it's a band aid yeah it's a band aid it's but it's a good band aid yes the good news is the band aid works the band aid works but you can't get band aids to all of the metaphors going to get ripped off painfully by global warming and you'll still be bleeding and have that pain i'm just imagining planet earth is like a mummy right now covered in all the band aids we're going to be using yes you just solve the original problem let's let's do that yes yes since we have a doctor with us he can truly attest to you you uh you don't just work on the symptom you work on the cause right it's like you for prevention prevention is everything that's listen that's not just it's not just yeah for for medicine and healthcare we're preventing the symptom of everything like an overheating computer a toxic relationship or killing off the coral reef we gotta prevent it all yes prevent it all except except for making friends we all should try and make friends friends you know this is a social glue for our society we've got family and we've got friends but how do we decide who is going to be our friend how do you think you choose your friends i put him through a psyche vow that's a step one but maybe it's more maybe it's more than that i should have a science binary quiz i run him through yes or no yes good well it could it could be more than just a simple do i like you or not like you how how nice are you are you mean you know the psychology of it but what about genetics did you know that there is some aspect of our friend choice that is affected by genetics we are very genetically similar to our friends which is interesting yes isn't that just because of racism and stuff there might be a confounding variable here yeah there are lots there yes there are many confounding variables involved here researchers investigating friends and social interactions mishie kelly at uh who's at who's an associate professor of anatomy and neurobiology publishing in molecular psychiatry from the university of maryland school of medicine was looking at mice and this interest in a particular kind of mouse that has a genetic difference has been an interest since about graduate school working in a pharmaceutical company she saw that there was a particular mutant mouse the pde 11 protein mutant and these pde 11 mutants are more socially withdrawn they don't they don't want to make friends they don't want to do anything like that thought they were really interesting wanted to use them as a mouse model of schizophrenia looked at their hippocampuses but went on beyond that and started realizing when looking at little colonies of these mice that the pde 11 mutant mice liked to hang out with other pde 11 mutant mice more than they like to hang out with other mice and it's a common common understanding that if in mice if you give them the scent of a friend or a stranger they're going to spend more time investigating the scent of the stranger and trying to learn about that novelty these pde 11 mice don't want to do that at all they're not interested they looked at in this particular study a couple of different variations in this mutant they had a knockout a pde 11 knockout mouse that had one of their amino acids changed so it's just a slight variant not that different from the pde 11 mutant the pde 11 mutants wanted to only hang out with the regular pde 11 mutants they did not want to hang out with the knockouts the knockouts did not want to hang out with the pde 11 mutants they only wanted to hang out with other knockouts they don't know exactly why this is happening or what's going on but there are um crebs cycle related molecular mechanisms in place in the hippocampus that are activated during these interactions so there could be some genetic based based on an attraction to smell or some other physical factor we don't know exactly but it could be that we are genetically drawn to the people we're friends with it's predetermined who your friends are people except for all those confounding factors so so my my first reaction is I want to know what the microbiomes of these mice are because because the love of my life they're all lab mice so they're probably all very similar but yeah but that might but it might have an effect on the love of my life is convinced that her traction to me is the fact that my microbiome can eat anything anytime and be absolutely regular and that and that it improves the more that we're together and then but my reaction to that is that the fact that she thought of that is why I'm attracted to her you know it's wonderful that our microbes our microbes want to meet other people's microbes I mean really this is all orchestrated we're the city bus I'll say it again we are the city bus for microbes that's all it is but I would wonder if there is like a downstream because it's some I mean and and in a real like there is got there's got to be a signal right that's going passing beyond the tissues and going into the maybe the air and a scent pheromone or a microbial sense some sense that may not be cognitively right understood but it's triggering but I'm like good no yeah yeah that's as far as I had I it's funny because I the reason I love as a scientifically curious person and as a journalist I love neuroscience so much because of how much we don't know and so like how much is possible and like the minute Dodger Kiki the minute you mentioned the hippocampus like my mind started spinning and I'm like okay learning memory but then the hippocampus is involved in other parts of our limbic system and emotions and input and like maybe one little tweak of the crab cycle makes you have some type of behavior that we're not cognitively aware of and just vibing you're just vibing you're vibing you're vibing these two mice they're like hey we're going to go over to this corner at the same time for some reason we don't know about and you're like what up bill like how's it going and you've just formed a friendship and the knockouts are in the other corner it's not like they don't like each other but they just they forge they bought it and they buy it before you know the intermingling I don't know I think the questions that do arise from things like this that are bigger questions related to social psychology and tribalism is how do we if we are genetically predisposed to self-select and to find those that are more like us genetically how do we then get past these genetic and psychological limiting factors that you know and this is not you know necessarily this is just a more philosophical question you know how do we really get past these biological psychological factors that limit our ability to really become one global tribe I'm just shaking my head that it's not happening you're like yeah no this is this is a leap from a mouse a mouse like mouse study to like the complexity of human dynamics and that's done all the time that's like we usually we usually most science leaves out the fact that it was a mouse study and it's usually male this was a mass mouse study usually when they talk about this information they leave out the fact that it was a mouse study and say scientists discovered that so but there's a great Twitter call just says in mice that retweets articles and like just in mice I love it perfect my final story for the night is in humans not in mice but this is another interesting psychological study in which researchers wanted to know what happened what happens when you tell people that two individuals personalities are similar are they recognized as being more morphologically similar are their faces seen as being more similar and their publication and cognition this last week suggests that yes if you were to convince somebody that Vladimir Putin and Justin Bieber were very similar in their personalities people would think them more physically similar that their faces are more similar power suggestion I mean that's what I'm wondering I'm wondering if it is the power of suggestion and or a framing and the the way that our psychology works to actually create these connections where there are none we've talked previously on the show because okay going from genetics genetics are going to determine your phenotype which is how you look and how you present and we know that there are various phenotypes from around the world different genes lead to different facial structures those genes could also be involved in personality so there could be a link between facial shape and personality but you know this also implies that we can wrongly assume that somebody is going to be more friendly than they actually are because we have this link between face and personality and if you learn that one person is very friendly and wonderful and you love their personality and you see somebody else that looks like them you just go oh I'm going to assume that you're friendly and wonderful also when they may in fact not be and the the converse applies as well that those personality types can also be applied to the faces and make the faces appear more similar I feel like I experienced this growing up in that every time I had a good friend with dark hair and we hung out a lot people confused us for each other even when we looked nothing alike and I feel like it's just your brain makes associations you know you try to categorization is like how our brain does stuff right so I think that a lot of it is just our brain trying to create shortcuts and categorize well I'm mistaken me for Sanjay Gupta so that clearly counts yeah so that yeah absolutely the implicit you know the whole basis of the implicit bias testing is the idea that we have made connections between things and categorize things in ways that sometimes we're not even aware of in this in this the one that you've got up there that's what is it who is that again Bieber and Putin that looks like yeah Justin Bieber and Vladimir Putin okay you know if you put an apple in an orange and that's the only thing in frame they're very similar apples and oranges are almost like they're both edible they're both round about that enough you throw a pair in there and now the orange is just odd man out is way farther away than than apple and pear but you know so it's also like what's what you're mixing into this this comparison in terms of context and all of the rest of that yeah and we do know that the way that we recognize faces is also our face kind of groups all of the features our brain groups all the features of the face and they we've shown in group pictures that people are generally thought of as like this generally attractive based on the general attractiveness level of the group that's why you want to go out with all your friends if you're looking for a date I guess because people will think it up it up up levels it increases your attractiveness to others if you're friends when they go out they just leave me but like I'll hang out with each of them and individually all the time but then when they go out as a group I'm always the one I never get the call right you're bringing down the group Justin it's also usually people say things like that person has kind eyes or like you know someone has rbf and these like features that you just immediately associate right with a personality trait and then you like try to mimic it and I'm like okay I'm gonna open my eyes wider and like style big you can some people learn how to how to make their faces do all sorts of things we call them actors it's one everyone in the customer service industry in the last 18 months learned how to do all sorts of acting with their eyes while their mouth is closed they really have a smile yeah exactly well you could be genetically predisposed to find your friends and it could also be that your friends look like your other friends and you like their personalities even though they're not really nice I don't know what you should make of all these stories but I think I thought they were fun and worth a discussion but we have done it for our stories for the evening this is kind of like how you question whether or not we could all come together and then give a couple of illustrations of why it's not gonna happen you're welcome this is why we need just good news next week I promise I will bring an absolutely positive upbeat just good news about an otherwise horrendous subject don't know what it's gonna be you'll find something the science actual good news the actual good news we can find it thank you everyone for listening we do hope that you enjoyed the show Dr. Patel thank you so much for joining us tonight this has been so thank you all I feel so much more empowered right now and I learned and I had fun that's the good news Justin that is good news where can people find you online people can find me at alok patel md on social media that's probably the best place to find me you can just google send me a dm don't send me any hate mail though I've been getting a lot of that lately sorry to hear that no the anti-vaxxers are loving anti-vaxxers are a loving compassionate group of people we all need to like revel in compassion right now I do want to talk about this but I'm going to wait till the after show but are you sticking around how long is the after show okay right I can take a round for a little bit I do I have a a formal morning a four-month-old who wakes up for a dream feed around now gets a little fussy and sassy all right well let's finish this show out so that we can all move on with this evening I would love to say thank you give some shout outs to people who helped the show thank you to fada for your help with show notes and show descriptions thank you to identity four for recording the show thank you to all of our moderators for keeping our chat rooms our discords everything happy and kind and compassionate because that's what we like in the world and we love to see it thank you so much for 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I can have the show for a few minutes. I can hear the little one waking up and stirring. Yeah, good to know. Yes, thank you so much for joining us tonight. This was really a lot of fun. I can't believe you all get to do this every week. We love it. It's pretty great. Yeah, it is fun. I'm like, oh, today's Wednesday. Yes. There's so many cool things, so many cool headlines out there that don't get the platform that deserves. I love the fact that y'all exist. Who else is talking about what's the plural of octopi, octopi, and octopuses? Octopuses. Octopi is better. That's what I'm saying. It's incorrect. You want to see it? I think both are allowed. My cappuccino, my cappuccino monkeys and my octopi are going to hang out together. We have a request from Pamela, who also has babies, to bring your baby on the show. Just go get your baby. Pamela, I would, but she has FOMO. So if she sees that there's lights and that there's things happening, she wakes right up and she's like, I want to hang. And then she goes ballistic. It's time to be awake then. Yep. She's very adorable. Otherwise, normally, maybe in the future, and maybe if I'm invited back up, if I'm not blacklisted after this episode, she'll make an appearance. Hardly. Aw, that's great. Justin, what was it that you wanted to? I can't remember. I don't remember what it was. It was about being trolled by anti-vaxxers. You wanted to ask about that. Compassion and, yeah. So is it really from a lot of your news reporting that you're receiving backlash? Yes. I mean, something new. Like I got my first hate mail in 2013. I felt like I was really cool back then. I was like, whoa, I'm actually deserving of hate mail. And it's only amplified because people have very strong opinions. And so anti-vaxxers also fit in the Venn diagram with anti-vaxxers and people who have certain beliefs about Western medicine. And there's a lot out there. The thing that got me the most hate mail of anything this entire year has not been about vaccines. I mean, one post about the fact that masking children is not the same as child abuse. Now, some people out there would make a very good case about why their child cannot tolerate a mask. I hear you, I get it. But when Tucker Carlson went out and said, you should call CPS if you see children in public wearing a mask, we went ballistic. Pediatricians did. I'm like, I actually have seen cases of child abuse where someone should have called CPS. And it was a dead. People went nuts. Like I woke up a beast. I had no idea. So on that specifically, I still don't understand. Because I remember when we very first started at a little community radio station, there was this whole thing, this whole like sort of course work that you had to read up on about calls to action. And why was it illegal to make a call to action? I want everybody to go over to my neighbor's house right now, blah, blah, blah, blah, because, and don't do that, by the way, that was not a call to action. This is not a call to action. It's just an example. But whatever it was, when you're asking people to go and do a thing, it was actually illegal. And it could get you kicked off the air. It could actually negatively impact the station, let alone just get you barred from the radio station. Doing something like that. And so I do not understand how that simple rule of not doing a call to action to do something ridiculous like this isn't enforceable on the site. But I do remember. It's because they're not news. They are not classified as news. No, no, no. But you don't need to be a news program to fall under making a call to action. You could be any kind of a thing like that. If you're asking people to go out and do that. I think also, it's not just the radio station we were on was a non-commercial radio station. So there were different restrictions there. That one seems pretty. That's like along the lines of spring fire. I mean, there's advertised that commercial stations are like, go buy a car. OK, $9.99. So I do recall sort of what my question was. Because I had, I also had, when we used to do the show, we had a chat room that was like a post chat. What do you call it? It was a forum. It was a web forum. We had a web forum. I don't know what those are called anymore. It was before they had social media. So we had like these little nucleated versions of this. And the ones that I kept getting were anti-evolution. Like somehow anti-evolution people caught the show and wanted to tell me why evolution was totally, like, and this is this whole thing. It's almost like there's a moving target of the, like right now it's anti-COVID. You know, it's also, you're going to get an anti-global, like global warming is like a hoax and it's meant to, like there's all these conspiracy theories. There's all these moving targets of anti-science that seem to like, like nobody's talking anti-evolution. We just, by the way, last week, apparently passed the threshold. Where a solid majority of Americans believe in evolution. 51%. Still less. Now it's 54, there's no credit. But it's still less than like the rest of the world except for Turkey. Okay. But why is there, why is it that there's always whatever the low hanging fruit of media interest is that scientists start coming forward and explaining becomes a target. And I think there's, I don't think it's necessarily completely like an anti-vax specific issue. So much as an anti-science sentiment. Like somehow science is threatening some ideology, some perspective out there that it feels like it needs to push back on it whenever science is trying to communicate on a larger scale. I think it's a fascinating topic of like study. But I honestly, like from my experience, and I will bring up the concept or bring up the example of evolution. People have beliefs that match another part of their identity. Whether it is their culture, their religious belief, their ideology, there's something else about them that makes this belief system attractive. I mean, there's a group online called Christians Against Dinosaurs, right? It's a real group. And so then if someone goes out and they're like, hey, evolution, here's the fossil record, here's proof of evolution. You're like, oh my God, you're not only attacking my belief system, you're attacking what I've been taught for 20 years. You're attacking who I am as a person. I mean, that's just, and the only reason I can say this is because if you see an Instagram post, for example, and it is debunking a popular myth or something with misinformation and you just quickly scroll down. The people who are angry, the people who was a person that you've attacked, they have like 15 paragraphs. And there's an emotion being spread on there. It's not a scientific discussion. And so I'm gonna be like, no, no, no, no, no, no. Actually, vaccines do have microchips, so let me prove it to you. No, it is someone, it is crazy. It's like, you're a shill, you work for pharma, you kill people. I mean, there is vitriol. You've attacked something in their core. Yeah, there was, I've been looking and I'm on the board for a science communication organization called Science Talk. And so I'm always on the lookout for new studies that look into why people believe the things that they do. And I just found something this week, researchers were looking into Christian religious groups and determined that the evangelical Christian mindset, it's not just their belief, but also the potential for their influence is decreasing. So the spread, they see science or in this particular study, it was a comparison with, it was the spread of pro-LGBTQ regulation, not regulations, but ideas and- Positive sentiment. Positive sentiment for LGBTQ people. And in line with that, even though the Christian gospel is to have kindness and compassion for people, they thought of it kind of as a zero-sum game. And that's what the researchers really hit on, is that this zero-sum game, this zero-sum like the way that it turned out is that it was losing not just to these other people, but also losing their influence. So it was attacking their belief system and the evangelical Christians were coming to the point where they were like, I'm being attacked. I see myself as being attacked, but it was basically because they were going to be less able to tell people that their way was right because these pro-LGBTQ ideas were coming in. And so I find that, I don't know if it's applicable to every group, but it's interesting to see that this belief system has this, it's black or white, it's kind of binary in the way that it, in the way that it comes out. And in the specific issue that you're talking about, it is exactly binary. Is the definition that you're using, yeah. We are tribal creatures. I mean, we see it with the politics, right? You attack a Democratic or Republican governor who has nothing to do with your life and like the tribe just, tribe just ascends on one another. Speaking of tribe, I have to go attend to a member of my tribe. Yeah, you said that your young one was waking up. So thank you once again, appreciate this moment to have a little extra time with you. Fantastic guesting. No, like I honestly appreciate it. And like, listen, in another time, another place, I would have a bourbon with me and we would continue this party for a lot longer. I'm actually trying to recall the last guest that did participate during the show, did their interview segment, continued to participate and hung out for the after show. It's a rare, rare all segment visit. Well done. It's a hat, it's a scientific, it's a twist hat trick. It is, for sure. I appreciate you all. I appreciate what you stand forward. Thank you for the invite. I hope we get to do it soon. Yeah. Do it again soon. Do it again soon. Yeah, it was wonderful. Thank you so much. Right on. Good night. Y'all have an amazing rest of the night. Good night. Oop, I was gonna hit the remove on a look, but I almost hit the remove on Justin. I would have been an accident. Oh no. I've been fine. I can find my way home again. Ooh, I have control and I can show everyone this. So this is one thing people in the chat when we're saying they wanted to see more about. So these are the floor tiles that I was talking about that were in Yosemite. So they are a little bouncy. They're not super bouncy. They're a little bouncy, but they harness energy. So I think it's, like I said, it's more demonstrative at this point. I think it's like proof of concept, but. I still have a hard time because I was like, the whole idea apparently of the exercise bike being tied to a generator, having a generator involved in it, apparently is such a, I had this idea, what if we gave everybody an exercise bike or tied every gym's exercise bikes to the grid? And then somebody pointed out like, yeah, that produced like nothing. Yeah. There's a bunch of problems with that. You burn more energy having the lights on in the gym than you would produce. Yeah. So bikes are creating centrifugal energy, which is like not very energy efficient if you're trying to harness it because you have energy leaving in all directions. Right? So that's a problem. So this is about the fact that a human and weight of a human and gravity is actually more energy. That combination is more energy. That weight is more energy than we can produce by putting out physical effort. Well, because this is just an up-down, right? So there's way less opportunity for you to lose energy and other vectors of motion. So there's that. There's also less resistance involved. And this is something that people are already doing. They're already walking through areas, right? So like the idea is you're, it's like checking all the boxes. But this is, again, this is like very, it's not like being used to power buildings yet. I don't think, but it's more of a show at this point. Yeah, but some of these, like the use of the triboelectric effect, I think is something that's really interesting. It's this, you know, it's like, you have these positive and negative terminals coming together when they do, they allow current to flow and to be created. And so, yeah. Yeah, I mean, bipedal walking, speaking of inefficient is extremely inefficient because you are losing vertical energy, right? Especially when you jog. Right, like if you watch like Steve Rogers, if you watch Chris Evans run, right? He's supposed to have like the perfect run, which he doesn't bob at all. He runs like this. I like watching Richard Simmons. He bobs a lot. The whole time. But yeah, so when normal people like I run, there's a lot of this going on, which you're losing a bunch of kinetic energy up, down, up, down. And so this harnesses that energy that is otherwise lost. Interesting. Yeah. Oh, I really hope it's a thing. Yeah, I mean, the problem, all that, we have so many amazing ideas. That's the thing that I love. Humanity, humans are creative. We have amazing engineers. We are devising different ways of doing things. We're solving problems. It's just a matter of applying them and being able to implement them to scale for the billions of people on the planet. It's one thing that we haven't brought probably nearly enough of. It could be its own podcast in a way. But every week, there's a story that I didn't select that is about a new material. Sometimes there's multiple of them in a week. Did you almost talk about the boron material? Is that the ferromagnetic? Maybe. Like which one? Which one? No, I mean, there's so much going on in material science right now alone that we could fill every episode probably with material science and what, and it's being done in proof of concept and it's being done on small scale and it's being done like, here's a way we could make a way more efficient battery. Here's a way we could make concrete that lasts for 10,000 years and doesn't contribute to global warming. Here's a way, here's a stronger steel. Here's a stronger way to assemble. Like, if we as a society focused on the things that actually could benefit us versus the things that detract, which is where we spend pretty much all of our time, effort and resource. Yeah. All right. Yeah. Boraphene. Boraphene. Boraphene. It could be a better graphing, but it's hard to get boron molecules, atoms to grow in layers like graphene does. This is the one, yeah, it's, what did they say? Five years ago, they created boraphene for the first time, stronger, lighter and more flexible than graphene. Boraphene has the potential to revolutionize batteries, electronic sensors, solar cells and quantum computing. They made a double layer of boraphene. Do, do, do. Good for batteries. We need critical thinking. That matrix energy, not so much harness the brain that Jackson talked about before is better. I like that matrix energy. But that was the thing, that was the original concept that was pitched for the original script of the matrix as that the human brains were going to be used for supercomputing. And somebody was like, well, why would anybody do that? No, we'll just make them batteries. And that turned out to be like, and people picked it apart forever because it was inefficient. But the writer props to the original writer. Writers, yeah, the Wachowskis. They had pitched it as supercomputer brain utilization. Utilization. Somebody asked what happened with my Twitter poll last week. Oh, what happened? I still object to the entire, because I didn't have enough of my ingredients in there or in the right order. It's a Twitter poll. You don't get to choose. You don't get to have everything. I should have had a couple more. There were no more characters left. Fine. So I will say that with 57% of the vote, Mayo and horseradish has won. Oh, God, people. Well, again, you know, that's the thing about the general populace doesn't always make the right decisions as we've been talking about all night. Yeah. Ranch and garlic powder, third place, 12%. Good. Mustard and dill, 31%. Last. I'm still gonna like my mustard and dill. Yeah, of course. It was a trick question, Jerry. Grouchy Gamer saying, hey, Justin, have you got your 3D print yet or built one or? Yeah. Have you 3D printed? So I didn't have one at work a few years back that was pretty fascinating because immediately the scientists were using it to make additions to equipment that they had that they didn't make an additional part for. Sometimes it was building parts for equipment that it was either that old that they couldn't get the parts for and so they could resuscitate and use old, maybe it was fermentation or micro scale throughput, fermentation devices or whatever it was. But no, I've never really played with one. I think the part where I would be messed up with trying to have a 3D printer was, because it's one of those things that sounds easy. Here's the schematic and here you go print it up. And then you hear about somebody who's made something that was a useful 3D printing device and they used like 34 types of plastics in the thing and which means you're changing them out constantly and it was like, no, it's still too hard. It's still not, it's still not Justin proof. It's gonna be a while. Too hard. All right, Kai has started school. I have to get up in the morning. Oh boy. You, Blair, get up earlier than I do still. Are you not gonna get up at five? Yeah, I just got up at 6.45 today. This is the first time I've done that in a while. I felt like I was jet lagged and trying to get up early to get on an airplane and I couldn't eat anything and my stomach hurt and my morning was shot. Ugh. It's gonna be great again tomorrow. Ready to go for it. Love. Let's do it. It's gonna be great. Love shifting my clock. It's the best. Yeah, it's gonna be great. Ugh. In case nobody noticed, I'm not a morning fan. Okay, in that case, say good night, Blair. Good night, Blair. Say good night, Justin. Good night, Justin. Good night. Keke. Good night, everyone. And why don't you guys get closer to your mic like that all the time? I wouldn't be able to see that. This video would be like this. Yeah, exactly. It's part of the problem, but also I wouldn't be able to read anything. Well, I can still read from here. Oh yeah, I'd be fine. I can't. My microphone's blocking the hall. See, I can't see. All right. I have a microphone. I see there is a microphone size issue. You might have to find some new microphones. These are a decade old, I think, so. Maybe about time. Actually, a microphone upgrade would be awesome. Yeah, I think it's a good idea. A microphone upgrade and a... Blair, you got a new microphone stand recently. Justin needs a new microphone stand. I have one. If you can give me one of the microphones that's like a very classic stick microphone, then I can just talk into the mic. Yeah, talk into the mic. All right, good night, everybody. Thank you so much for joining us. Chris Clark sent me a mic stand just a bazillion years ago. It still have it, it still works. It just, not with the mic. The microphone I have now is not the one that fits it. The old microphone died, sadly. I just need the microphone upgrade. I've got the stand ready to rock and roll there. There you go. Night, I'm gonna try and find a microphone that's not cool looking, that doesn't float in front of your face. It's, like Blair said, just something that you can talk into. Yeah, it is very fun. I can pretend I'm like playing Mario Kart. But. I would love to see an episode where both of you just have your microphones covering like half of your face, but it sounds awesome. Yeah, I was talking to Brian about that yesterday because we were watching a YouTube video that is all images and you don't see the people's faces ever, but the sound quality was perfect. Chef's kiss. Yeah, so. So I didn't know this was the thing, but my youngest daughter made a video of herself singing and then cut the audio out and replaced it with the help of my older daughter and talked over it. And it was like, it's kind of creepy and weird, but it was like, well, this is really, this is better quality than higher production than our show. Oh, jeez. Like she's singing, but then she's talking like right into the mic for all the lyrics as the big picks. Like the video is her singing it out and it probably was terrible audio, but when she's just doing this and it was like really like the amazing mix. So she dubbed, she dubbed her mixing. She dubbed herself and it was really cool. And it done a good job. Okay. Good night everybody. We'll be back again next week. Thank you so much for joining us. Have a wonderful science week. Stay safe. Stay curious. Put it all in your head.