 Bim, bim, bim, bim, bim, bim, bim. We are back. It's This Week in Science, ready for another live podcast broadcast. I'm so excited for tonight's show and we're absolutely going to be hitting the tight 90. Absolutely, the dream of dreams. Are you all ready for a good science show? Because I think we're ready for it right now. And as we get into it to jump it into the science, we're gonna bring you all the science news. Make sure you hit the likes and the shares and all the things to get us into the algorithms on the Facebook, Twitch and the YouTubes. And this is not edited, it is live. And so the podcast will be edited to reflect that. Are we ready to go? Yes, let's do it. Okay, let's do that. It's a time for that now. Let's do that. We are going to start the show. Hello everyone in the chat rooms and in the discord, starting the show in a three, two. This is Twist. This Week in Science, episode number 929, recorded on Wednesday, June 7th, 2023. What will you do with all this science? Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Kiki. And tonight on the show, we will fill your head with bird dreams, touchy plants and RoboChef. But first. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. The following program is provided on an as is basis, as is the culture you're living in, the resources you have access to and the planet upon which you are spinning. The current environment you are experiencing should not be considered permanent. And there is no implied expectation of warranty or prolonged habitability on earth, as past climate is no guarantee for future conditions. While considerable effort is being made to raise awareness and inform the public, any action taken to prevent climactic climate change should have taken place before the awareness was sought. The media is not covering the crisis. No government is taking control of the situation. Industries are not changing their behavior and the people who are in power do not have your best interests in mind. I repeat, those with the power to make change do not have your best interest in mind. And while there's still a chance that one day science may science our way out of this global extinction event, there's also a very good chance that it won't. In which case the only thing that will really matter is another episode of This Week in Science coming up next. Got the kind of mind that can't get enough. I want to learn everything every day of the week. There's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek. I want to know. It's science to you, Kiki and Blair. And a good science to you too, Justin, Blair, and everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of This Week in Science. We are back again with all the science that you can fit in your head. That's right. That's what we're doing. Thanks everyone for joining us. Happy VCR day. Go get those. Oh, man, that's so fun. Big old tapes out of storage and celebrate back in the day when Twist was one of the few media outlets that was discussing the fact that climate change was an issue. I was still, I mean, yes, there were DVDs and everything at the point, but I was still renting VHS tapes from the local anime store. Wait a second. Be kind rewind, man. The movie is early too. As I recall, the first syndicated version of this show was cassette tapes that would get mailed out. Even further. Mailed out. Yeah, no, that was the thing. Mailed against that tape. You never made a difference. Yeah, the postman took it uphill both ways in the snow, right? Yeah, yeah. There you go. No, I'm still happy VHS is just in the other room. I still got some. I'm sure the tracking is problematic, but. Yeah, most likely. I mean, especially if you're trying to watch that VHS tape on a DVD player or your live streaming, whatever box that you have on here. I think you'll start a fire. I think. And that would be toxic, so let's not do that. On this week's show, we have lots of science news. I have stories about space exploration with J-WIST, Forever Chemicals, our RoboChef Future, Privacy, Psychedelic Brains, and Bird Dreams. Wow. I always have bird dreams. What do you have for us, Justin? I've got a fishy, younger, driest story. More human intelligence competition. One thing we can do to stop global warming and some news from the Amazon. Ooh, from the Amazon. Bring it. Blair, what is in the animal corner? Oh, yes. What did I even bring for you today? I have some endangered species and I have some unusual mimicry. And before we get in the animal corner, I have those touchy plants you mentioned. Touchy touchy. We got to find out all about that. As we jump into the show, everyone, I want you to know that if you subscribe to This Week in Science on any one of those many platforms for the podcast or for the live streaming or for the, you know, when you want to watch the video later, you know, that's a great thing to do. You should do that. So subscribe. And you can find us weekly Wednesdays, 8 p.m. Pacific time on Facebook, Twitch, and YouTube right there right now, everybody. My gosh, say hi. Where are you? Which chat room are you in? Say hello and tell your friends about it. Make sure to share the news about the live streams every time that we have a new episode. And subscribe and hit those likes. And if this isn't your thing, just make sure that you had to twist.org and you can find information about the show there. Yes? Or you can write in and request an audio cassette tape. That you will never receive. Send a town crier with a scroll. That would actually be very funny. Here ye, here ye, I now claim it is the beginning henceforth of twists. Okay, time for the science. Yeah, let's talk about the opposite of old timey tech. Yes, the very, very opposite of old timey tech. Let's first discuss new timey tech of the J-WIST, the James Webb Space Telescope, which is peeking out at the universe, even now collecting data that it is then, that is then being analyzed by researchers, astrophysicists around the globe for various ends with various questions in mind and two particular studies came to the forefront this week. One is looking, has looked very far back into the furthest reaches of light that has been sent to our little planet from elsewhere. And in that looking, researchers at UCLA and internationally have confirmed the faintest, the dimmest galaxy in the universe that we've seen so far. And what do we mean by faint? Well, it just isn't very bright. Most of the galaxies we see, we see because they're bright and they're putting off a lot of light, emitting a lot of radiation. There's a lot of electromagnetic spectrum that is out there and they're just like, hi, I'm here, you can see me. But the further you go back, especially considering the stuff that was right at the end of the cosmic microwave background era, the time of the great ionization, you started having coalescing into universe's galaxy, the not universe, into galaxies, stars, et cetera, et cetera. And researchers think that looking at the really, really dim things out there that are obviously very far away could be looking that far back. And so these researchers have just published in Nature, their confirmation of a particular galaxy called JD-1. JD-1 is the most distant and dimmest galaxy identified to date. It is one of the first galaxies to be emerging from that fog of ions that we now still kind of hear as the static, if you have a radio or a television. They have confirmed that it was approximately 13.4 billion years ago that this galaxy came into existence. So it was a few hundred thousand years after the beginning of the universe, which was about 13.8 billion years ago. And so these really dim galaxies are very rare. We really haven't seen them. And this is an amazing step forward because without J-WIST, we never would have been able to see this very dim galaxy. I gotta wait a second though. We're talking about a whole galaxy. Anyway, it only took a couple of hundred thousand years like on a galactic time scale. That does not seem like very much time. I think something's wrong with somebody's math. Yeah, so okay, so this was the light that we are seeing. They think it's really, as from what they can tell, this was emitted 13.3, 13 to 4.4 billion years ago when the university was only about 4% of its present age. That this is like the first not big deal galaxy, not the bigger ones, but this is like an old dim galaxy. And we're just starting to see that light. I'm totally willing to say, okay, that's that early. It's that long ago, because it's that dim and everything else. But then to say, but we're sticking with the number of how old the universe is. And it took six weeks for that early galaxy to form. That's the part I'm like, can you just, if you drop that number out of the discussion, then I'm okay with it being 13.4 billion years old. If you tell me the universe can only be 13.6 billion years old, or not even that, it would be less than that. Like forget it, it's, I mean, I think things still took time. Well, it's very interesting because we have also our idea of cosmic expansion or universal expansion, right? So this was light that has actually been traveling to us for over 25 million years or 25 billion years. I'm sorry, that because of expansion, the light was emitted 13.3 billion years ago. It's been traveling towards us for some 25, 26 billion years and it's finally reached us. And still we had to use gravitational lensing to be able to see it, that using the bending of space time by gravitational bodies to make it possible for us to even see this in the first place. So there are a lot of assumptions in place and I do agree with you there because we're kind of like, this is this, this date, so far basically, all the evidence lines up that this is when this stuff started, inflation, Big Bang, inflation, blah, blah, blah, all that kind of stuff. And then this is, we're hitting the front edge of the wave of galactic formation. Okay, here's a problem. The universe is how old? Like 13.8 billion years old. How long did it take for the light to get to us? 25 or 30 billion years and how old is the universe? The third, fourth, yeah, exactly. Okay. The expansion rate, which we're still trying to move. Ah, it's math. It's the math is just not right. I will continue to shake my old manifest for my front line. Shake your stick at it and... Can't be right. Mr. Physicist who studies this all the time. Yes. I'm gonna say something really controversial now, which is, it doesn't really matter. It's just really old. It's really, really, really old. Thank you. Yeah. Well, there's stuff. And when we're talking that old, it's like, we get it. It's really old. At some point, how a thing started doesn't matter. It's all the things that happened after that that are really the interesting things anyway. Well, and then there's the relativity of time and space and then like to time travel, did things pass the same way? I want to inspire the next generation to investigate these things because once they get general relativity and all the expansion, inflation and all these things figured out, then maybe we'll have our wormhole time travel kind of stuff. Sure. You're right. You're right, of course. This is all about inspiration, curiosity, inspiration. Keep asking the question. I mean, today, right here, right now does 14 billion years ago matter and a few quibblings of hundreds of thousands of years? No, but yes. Yes, there are great people out there working on these questions. But again, to talk about something else that happened probably about 12 billion years ago. So a little more recently in our universal timeline, the J-WIST has also, thanks again, to something that is called an Einstein ring, which is also a gravitational lensing of a sort. Researchers have been able to image the oldest or most distant complex organic molecules in the universe, 12 billion years ago. Yeah, what? What do you mean? What are you talking about? So an Einstein ring is a situation where one galaxy is lined up exactly behind another galaxy or gravitational body within our view of space. And the lensing occurs so that the galaxy in the back gets, instead of melted and warped and magnified around one side of the intervening gravitational body, it gets warped in a ring around the outside of whatever that gravitational body is. So it's a ring of the distant galaxy so that we can actually look at the chemical signatures, the molecular signatures, the light signatures that are there to be able to get an idea of what's happened in that galaxy that we can't really see that's smeared around as a magnified ring. Yeah, but how useful is that? I mean, so what I mean is like, I get when we're doing a chemical analysis of something like the trails coming off of a comet. It can tell us what that comet's made up of. But this is a whole galaxy. There's a bunch of the suns and planetoids and everything, it's many, many, many solar systems. It's like getting an amine of a galaxy. Yes, a galley, it's amine, it's an average, it's a smear. This galaxy that they were looking at in the background, they were able to take a generalized signature of what, because we know the way that different light interacts and what to look for. And actually, one of the researchers on this study that again was published in Nature from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and also some students with researchers at Texas A&M University and international collaborators, one of the researchers actually did their PhD thesis on this background galaxy that's got smeared out and the potential of using an Einstein ring to be able to look at its light. And now they're a researcher and able to actually use JWIST to do what they talked about doing in their PhD dissertation. So that in itself is pretty cool. The galaxy that JWIST focused on is SPT0414-47 and this was discovered by NSF's South Pole Telescope and it was a dust-obscured galaxy that they kind of figured was about 12 billion light years from Earth when it first was born. So it came of age at about 1.5 billion years after the universe got its start. Give or take, quibblings. But they were able to look at the spectroscopic data that they understand from other analyses of various things. Look at the light and yes, the average light and they were able to determine that not only did it just have basic molecular components, but there were spectroscopic signatures of an organic compound called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon, PAH. And PAH actually is a molecule that's emitted from our cars. And oh, you might, it might be in the skies right now over those Canadian forest fires, probably. But they are also considered because they're organic and they are these cyclic compounds and hydrocarbons that they are some of the basic building blocks of life. So the idea is that even though it is a smear, these polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons suggest that there are the building blocks for life. And if we think of it as like forest fires and the exhaust from our vehicles burning fossil fuels, this suggests that maybe that smear contained some, some aspect of life in it, possibly. Is it destroyed life? Is it life that came before? We don't know, is it just a thing? To see it even in this galactic smear, how common would it have to be? Yes, exactly. I mean, this doesn't sound like it would be one planet somewhere in that galaxy. Right. One solar system where somebody would someone looking at us from that far away, be able to recognize complex organic molecules in our solar systems. And I would guess no, maybe I'm wrong, but I would guess no. I guess I would think planet Earth alone wouldn't be enough to make the Milky Way have that signature. Yeah, exactly. So that would have to suggest on some level that it's actually pretty common. Yeah, building block of life. So is it before in the process of the evolution of the galaxy or is it toward the end of the evolution of the galaxy? We don't know. 12 billion years ago, so. The thing about space is that it's really big. It's really big, yeah. Very big. They heard an analogy the other day that if the universe was the ocean, what we've observed thus far is it would fit in like a coffee mug. Like, we really for as far as we. Yeah, I was going to say a thimble. A thimble. As far as we have looked and as much as we have seen and as much as we have learned, we've still just barely, barely explored what space is. What space is? Yeah, so much to learn. Well, turning it back on us a little bit, one last quick story for this intro space segment. Researchers at Caltech have announced the successful pilot of their Maple project, which is a part of their SSPD project. What is all this stuff? Well, Maple stands for microwave array for power transfer low orbit experiment, which is within this SSPD or Caltech's space solar power demonstrator, which is part of the space solar power project. So what have they done? Well, they have a little satellite in space that they launched up into space. It's collecting solar energy on small solar panels. It has a receiver or it has a setup that takes that energy and transforms the solar energy into a direct current that can be sent by transmitters. And they're the transmitters. Did they make a space laser? It's not a laser, not a laser. No, just like pulses of and it's not a laser. Their idea is that they want to be part of developing a democratic worldwide free energy program where instead of just the sun beaming down on us is sending sunlight to us that we can then harness here on the surface of the earth. The idea is that if you have a receiver on the surface of the planet and there is a transmitter up over the planet in space that is collecting that solar energy that energy can be wirelessly transmitted directly from space. Just do the transformation in space. Do we already have a way to wirelessly get energy from the sun down to the earth? Like it feels like it's an unnecessary step. Yes and no. Because the way that power is generated and at this point in time solar power is still not widespread enough to make it easily accessible. And the idea is that this would be the kind of situation where a receiver system could be set up in a war-torn area in a third world country. Maybe even in some place in the United States instead of putting together a solar power plant or putting together a fossil fuel refinery or instead of mining for coal or doing a wind farm or whatever you have these receivers and those go directly into energy transmission lines here on the planet. So energy can be transmitted, transported here on the planet easily. The idea is that it makes electricity available, energy electricity available immediately. Highly skeptical. Very, yes. There's a lot of things, a lot of questions here. This sounds like a way to keep people from creating their own energy on their home and instead make sure that energy companies are still in charge. No, no. I mean, there are lots of questions and there are of course lots of conversations to be had about sticking giant satellite arrays with solar arrays in low-earth orbit up around the planet, how that would affect all sorts of night sky viewing and other things. How many satellites can we and should we put up in orbit around our planet? What are the uses? But this, anyway, this particular demonstration successfully showed that they could take in solar energy on one side of the satellite, fine, the ISS has solar panels, great. They were able to make electricity on their satellite. Woo-hoo. But then what they were able to do is transmit it across open space to a receiver a meter or so away and there were two receivers that they were then able to use based on the directionality of the transmitter to turn on little LEDs on their satellite. So they just transmitted electricity wirelessly across empty space. But not only that, so they said, wait, wait, wait, not only did they just transmit the electricity across this like 1930s technology, but it is totally and they turned on their LEDs and they went, woo-hoo, our satellite's working and this is working up there. Additionally, they were able to, there was a window installed in the satellite that allowed the transmitter to send its signal toward the earth. And researchers at Pasadena's Caltech University had an array that was set up to receive a receiver that was set up to receive the signal and they were able to read the signal at the appropriate time in the expected frequencies that were expected for the distance that the signal was traveling and blah, blah, blah. But so signal was- This isn't the 1950s though. The energy from space to earth. Okay. Okay, if that's what the signal was, powering up a bat, they charged it a phone. They haven't done anything like that yet. No, okay. So it's all, they haven't done any of it. They got a signal from an object in orbit? That can't be possible. I just like, I haven't figured out why, why, why yet. Well, if you have a really, really big solar array with a big transmitter- Dyson sphere. Well, not evil. I mean, that's different altogether, but you could transmit a focused signal to a particular spot on a planet, which is maybe geosynchronously locked with the satellite and have a wireless transmission of current. This is a wireless transmission of current. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, that's, I mean, we've, again, that's 1930s technology. Oh yeah, this is, I mean, this is Tesla's wireless. Yeah. This is, this is, yes. It's going back- The free energy from a giant tower. Yes. Yeah. This sounds more helpful to me for like Mars colony stuff. Very possible. We have a lot of issues here on our planet though, still, but I just wanted to put it out there that demonstrated, and as you might be saying, 1930s technology, it's successful so far. They have a lot of, they have a long way to go. This was a pilot. This is the very first step in the process. No one encouraged them to keep going. The one thing that turned out to be a obstacle for Tesla creating a free energy generator that would just power people's devices in their homes without wires, was that then there's no way to charge for it. Yeah. Well, that is a part of the idea here. The one of the individuals who is behind the funding of this research, he's a philanthropist and he was, he put money in excess of a hundred million dollars in support of the project to, he's excited about the idea and ability to one day create a world powered by uninterruptible renewable energy. And I love that. I just, if anybody can tap into the same source of energy at the same time, it stops becoming a resource. Like there does, I don't know. Yeah, but this, yeah, bigger different conversations. Pilot study happened, very successful. Let's talk about your issues with the Younger Dryas. My issues, yeah, I've got nothing but issues right now. What is going on? What's going on? Come on, can you figure this old guy with your cane? I have a problem with every story I've looked at. I'm out of my science yard. This is actually, I love this story. Research led by Department of Anthropology at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks has delved into freshwater fishing practices of ancient Native Americans in Eastern Beringia, which is Western Australia, Western Alaska. So the team went through all these sites that were older than 7,000 years looking for fish. And they found eight sites that were identified all near the Tanana River off the tributary off the Yukon River. And these, eight of them that had actual, not just reports of fish being found, but actually had the material available to study. Seven of the sites were dating from the Younger Dryas, which is 11,650 to 12,900 years old-ish. They found 1100 something fish that were identified. The fish that they identified were mostly fish that, were all fish that can be caught in those waterways today with some interesting exceptions. All the identified fish before 11,800 years ago were freshwater fish, meaning no salmon, basically. So something happened after Younger Dryas, maybe before, caused by Younger Dryas, that may have cut off the supply, the ability for salmon to make it that far inland. And then after things warmed up again, they start showing up. So Younger Dryas, for those who aren't familiar, is a climate-driven extinction event. The planet was leaving the Ice Age. Continental glaciers were receding. Humans, megafauna were expanding into new territories that were nice and lush. In the Northern Hemisphere. And so everything was great, and then Younger Dryas happens. And suddenly we're back in the Ice Age. With some places that were having lower temperatures, then there were at the glacial maximum. There's a pretty good idea of what happened. The idea is that there's this giant inland lake, because there's a continental glacier that's still there before Younger Dryas starts. Over Northeastern America and most of Canada, it's still giant glacier there. That whole corridor thing in the West has opened up and it's gone. And what they think happened is this massive lake of melting ice is formed. And at some point there's a glacial dam break. And it just pours a freshwater cold water lake, a third of the size of Canada into either the Arctic or the North Atlantic Ocean. And that shuts down the thermal conveyor belt of the Atlantic, which is why temperatures drop and things get really dry in the Northern Hemisphere. But the Southern Hemisphere is relatively unaffected. In Australia, it doesn't even notice that this has happened. Because it's a climate incident, but it's localized. It's localized to the Northern Hemisphere, weather patterns change and all of this. So one of the things that come out is that it just, because I saw Nova's special once, and I went, oh, that's interesting. I didn't know that there was a comet that hit at the same time that this lake formed in. So I went looking into it and basically, yeah, the Younger Dryas impact theory, three things you need to know about it. One, it's total nonsense. Two, it should be studied, like the papers should be studied, the research that went into it should be studied because it's a prime example of data selection bias, of like to believe that there was a Younger Dryas impact theory, you first have to believe that there was an impact. And then the data will fit. If you didn't go in already believing it, none of the data made it doesn't, yeah. And then three is actually the Blair's point for earlier, it really doesn't matter. All the interesting stuff happens afterwards anyway. And in fact, it got to the point where the, I think the last round of Younger Dryas impact theory was that this comet or asteroid or meteorite, whatever it is, hit the remaining ice pack and pushed it into the water. So it ends up trying to slip in where the original glacial dam burst started anyway. So it's cyclical and it's nonsense. Anyway, the climate-driven event regards how it started vegetation dried up through prolonged droughts in some areas. When it was over, most of the large mammals of the Americas were gone. Horses, camels, giant sloths, saber-toothed cats, dire wolves, short-faced bears, and woolly mammoth, all went extinct. Which we're so sad about and everybody's still trying to bring back that mammoth. And maybe we should. Moving on. Because it turns out they were doing fine when things were warming up. It's when it got cold again that they had the problem. There were also significant reductions in by the millions of bison, deer, caribou, moose, all the frequently hunted creatures by megafauna predators. They all vanished. So if you've ever thought that, oh, humans came to the Americas and that's why everything went extinct, way too many animals gone way too fast for it to have been humans. What's not human hunters? Humans were hunting, but that was just part of stuff. And in fact, this is also when Clovis culture disappears. It's appeared. So Clovis culture is the most technologically advanced big game hunting stone spear type technology out there. You have a spear tip that you throw the spear and the spear will fall off and the spear tip stays in the animal. So you can reuse it. You can take another spear tip, you slap it in, you can throw it in. It was like the most advanced thing. That technology goes away. People don't. And what's interesting is the intensity of fishing at the Tanana River Basin shows up during the dry ice. It isn't there before, shows up during younger dry ice and then kind of diminishes again after. So what it's showing is that people switched when the big game dropped because of starvation, because of drying out, because of wildfires that were taking place because like we know in California now in Canada, when you have a prolonged drought, wildfires take over, they wipe out the vegetation. The vegetarian animals are all dying off. The predators of those animals were dying off and the humans were like, ah, it's too far to walk to find anything to hunt. So they went, they turned to fishing. One of the things I also thought was interesting about this and it's not mentioned in the study, all these megafauna and big animals disappear at this point. You know what survived? Brown bears. Interesting. One of the other bears and the other big carnivore, they disappear. Brown bears, fish. Oh, they fish. They fish. So here we have, here we have, that was the adaptability of humans and bears to be able to go, that's not available anymore. I'm gonna switch to something else. And actually the bears may have already been heavily relying on fishing because there was this short-faced bear which is like this bigger, the biggest bear that ever lived that used to actually be quick enough and big enough to hunt animals. Like it would hunt prey. Like brown bears don't really like chase deer. So they were pushed maybe into having to forge on berries and fish because there was a larger apex predator bear around. But anyway, bears and humans, it was fish that got them through the younger dryests and there was no impact. Well, you know, I hope that we'll all be able to survive on the fish. Oh, wait, we're killing all the fish. Anyway, Blair, tell us about the plants. How do the plants feel about all this? How do they feel? Well, I don't know, but I know that they do feel which is really what this study is about. This is from Washington State University. We know that plants can respond to touch in certain ways. That was one of our very first twist shorts was about the mimosa plant that can respond to touch, for example. But this recent study has shown that plants can sense not only when something touches them, but also when they stop touching them. And so it's a unique signal, the difference between being touched and the touching stopping, which is an interesting identification considering that plants don't have nerve cells. So how can they tell this kind of very distinct stimuli and the stopping of stimuli without nerve cells? Instead of experiments, individual plant cells responded to the touch of a very fine glass rod by sending slow waves of calcium signals to other plant cells. And when that pressure was released, they sent more rapid waves, a distinct new signal throughout their cells. This is 84 experiments on 12 plants using fail, crests, and tobacco plants. They had been specifically bred to include calcium sensors. Calcium channels are something that is being studied pretty heavily. And so it's something that kind of was found in plants and is the inspiration to an entire field of study. But so because of that, there's already selective breeding happening for plants that have really sensitive calcium channels. So they were able to kind of use these guys. They applied a slight touch with a microcantilever, which is the tiny glass rod I mentioned. It's about the size of a human hair. And so they saw these very complex responses that were different between touch and the removal of touch. And so that's important because we have specialized cells throughout our bodies, like nerve cells, but plants, all the cells are kind of the same. And so it doesn't matter which cell it is, they can kind of send these cascading signals throughout the plant through these calcium channels. In future studies, they want to figure out what triggers downstream events. So basically, okay, great, you're sending these signals why and what happens as a result of these signals. Is it the starting of touching? Is it the stopping of touching? Is there a response to both? What are those responses? And so that's kind of the next step is why would they have a response to these two pieces and what are those responses? So I think that's really cool, but it's not just, you know, I got poked and I'm responding. It's I recognize I am currently being touched and now I recognize the touching has stopped. Yeah. So first thing I'm thinking is gonna be one is, am I being eaten? And if so, I should then, you know, if I determined that I'm being eaten, maybe stop sending nutrients to that part of me. Right. Or send chemicals. Right. Just press chemicals out signals, yeah. Right, yeah, counter-effects. Chemicals, yeah. And then the stop touching is, okay, let's get in there and fix stuff. If anything's broken, let's put it back together. Whatever was eating us has moved on. Because I think that's what the plant's got to just worry about as far as worry goes. You know, be concerned because you're stuck in one place. Mostly concerned with damage and repair. Well, so that's what I would want to know though, is if plants can tell the difference between touch and the severing of cells, because those can be very different stimuli. No nerves. Right, but can they tell? Is there a difference between breaking a cell wall and poking a cell? And then. So what if the signals themselves are just like an MRI of itself? You know what I mean? Like, if they all come back, we're good. If we send them out in half or missing. Yeah, does it have to come back? There's no, I mean, what's the sensory aspect of it? Yeah, I know. Yeah, it's just sending a signal out. But why is that? Maybe it causes a break, but we know plants can sense vibration. They can hear to some extent. Maybe it's involved in reproduction, or yeah, maybe there, I don't know. So many ideas. Why does a plant need to know when it's not being touched? Yeah. I don't know the answer to this. Hopefully they can find what signals get turned on and off. We'll find out. I'm confident. It will happen. It will happen, yes. Oh, do I have a story now? Yes. You do. Oh, what's happening with, oh, I turned myself off. Nope, there's something weird happening. We see you and we hear you. Sorry, there was something weird happening in my stream yard back end here. So anyway, all right. Let's talk about forever chemicals. Just for a moment. P-5. No. Oh, sorry. Yeah, we don't like forever chemicals because why? Is it forever? Yeah, they stick around forever. They don't disintegrate over time. They just kind of stick around and oh gee, not just stick around, cause all sorts of environmental and health problems. Research published just at the end of like the May 31st, June 1st, this last week in Annals of Global Health from UCSF, researchers at UCSF's program on reproductive health and the environment took advantage of documents that had been kept secret by DuPont and 3M, the largest manufacturers of PFOS that ended up in the University of California's document database. They have a UCSF chemical industry documents library. They got a hold of these documents from an individual who, Robert Billott, who was an attorney who filed a lawsuit against DuPont for the toxic nature of PFOS contamination. And also his story was in a documentary called Dark Waters. And then there's another documentary, The Devil We Know who ended up donating these documents to the University of California in San Francisco. However, nobody had really ever analyzed them before. And in analyzing all the documents, the researchers say they were able to determine that having the documents allowed us to see what the manufacturers knew and when and also how polluting industries keep critical public health information private. So not much was known about PFOS toxicity for about 50 years after it was invented and it started being used. And the research states without a doubt that very similarly to techniques used by the sugar industry and also the cigarette manufacturing industry that DuPont had evidence of PFOS toxicity from internal animal and occupational studies that they did not publish in the scientific literature and failed to report to the EPA as required under the TSCA. They were all marked, the documents were all marked as confidential. And in some cases, industry executives are explicit that they wanted this memo destroyed. Okay. Okay. So... Yeah. Lock them up. Right. Are they alive? These people, the companies... The researchers, the companies are great. The companies need to get sued out of every dollar. They have been sued and... They need to be resued. Yes. And not capped and not... Well, let's make a settlement here and then never again, no, no, no, no, no. This is different. Yeah. This is all new ballgame. So lawsuits were filed in 1998 and 2002 and this kind of brought media attention to PFOS contamination in 2004. The EPA fined Dupont for not disclosing their findings on PFOA, not PFOS, and there was a $16.45 million settlement that was the largest civil penalty obtained under the US Environmental Studies, Environmental Statutes, $16.45 million. Nothing. Compared to their one... Dupont alone has $1 billion in annual revenues from PFOA yearly. That was in 2005. Yeah, this is one of those things. Why can't businesses be canceled? Like, why aren't you not allowed to business anymore at this point? Yeah. But this is the question that I bring. We have this scientific information. We have whistleblowers. We have people who have brought this information to bear. And now finally, decades later, we have research analyzing these documents that can state, hey, yeah, not only was it shown in these lawsuits that they knew stuff, but these documents really, really say these executives knew what was going on and they hid it and they lied about it for profits. And this is not in the best interest of the public health. So how do we increase transparency in chemical-driven industries? How do we increase regulations? How can we create an industry in which we expect that chemicals are going to do bad things and they're not allowed to be used until they're proven to be fine in most of them? So one suggestion I would have is if any of these people are alive, they should be in jail. Assuming the company's one thing. If there's individuals who viewed these documents, one of them destroyed. If they're alive, they should be in prison. Second, you should generationally, multi-generationally claw back every dollar that they earned from that company. Claw back, if they're gone and their children's children are living off of that money, it should be clawed back. Yeah, but this is a case where the science has taken is taking time, has taken time. And I hope this is a story that continues to make its way out into the media and into the public because this is the kind of information that people need to know about that these corporations, that executives have put profits over people. And yeah, as early as 1961, Teflon's chief of toxicology discovered that Teflon materials had the ability to increase the size of the liver of rats at low doses. Advised the chemicals be handled with extreme care and that contact with skin should be avoided. It's already dead. 1970 internal memo, DuPont funded Haskell laboratory, found one particular PFOS called C8 to be highly toxic when inhaled and moderately toxic when ingested. 1979, they discovered dogs who were exposed to a single dose of PFOA died two days after ingestion. 1980, DuPont and 3M learned two of eight pregnant employees who had worked in C8 manufacturing had children with birth defects. When they stated in an internal memo, we know of no evidence of birth defects caused by C8 at DuPont. Well, yeah, because they didn't study it because they were like, hey, never have this kind of study. Yeah, don't do that. We should never look into this. We should never. We don't have anything of it. Yeah, so this article, the devil, the new chemical documents and chemical documents analysis of industry influence on PFOS science is in the annals of global health. And we will, of course, link to these stories on our website. Clow back. I don't care if it's great green children. Clow back to any dollar that they have and it's ill gotten. Yes. I don't need my non-stick pan. A non-stick pan? Well, I kind of do. Yeah, you know what? Maybe it's not worth it. Just season your pans. I mean, maybe it's not, maybe it is was worth it. Yeah. We're all gonna die anyway. Too hard to cast iron, remember that? We have rusting pans. This is a very fatalist show. No, no. I'm just repeating. I'm not gonna say I'm not, but oh my goodness. Let's talk about some ancient grave diggers. Maybe it was the right choice. Brief discussion of ancient grave diggers. Brief. Okay, so you remember Home in the Lattie? They found all those dead hominins in the cave? I mean, obviously they're dead. The cave that they had to only have little anthropologist archaeologists. They had a higher, tiny female anthropologist to go spelunking into this cave. This is a, this is 240,000-ish years ago, to 300,000 years ago. This was a new hominin that we found a while ago. And we knew that they were burying their dead because, or placing their dead in this underground cave because the ages were all disparate. It wasn't like a bunch of people of any certain time point had died and got buried in there or anything that they were being placed in there over time. Well, now they're suggesting the bodies that were found in the cave were not simply deposited, but were carefully positioned and then covered up, buried. Buried. In the cave. Which was- And this wasn't this one of the ideas when they first kind of like, ooh, there's a bunch of bones and maybe this was a ceremonial grave site. Like that was kind of an interesting thing. Well, they at least knew it was grave because you can kind of tell when there's not specific injuries. Like there's, it wasn't the cave collapse when they have, you know, when you have a population that is mostly elderly, but then some young, it looks like a graveyard, statistically. So the oldest human burial is about 73,000 years old. There we go. Man, maybe it's older if you count the Neanderthals and that, but this is 240 plus thousand years old. And then, they also suggest that there was, they found cross-hatched etchings in the walls that have been placed there over at various times and some food offerings in this, what is now a tomb, what is now you can conceive of as an underground mausoleum. They have some animal offerings to the dead. They have this cross-hatching patterns, symbology on the walls. And they think for all this to take place, they must have had, well, some of the animal offerings were cooked in the cave. Okay, that's what they were using it. Which means they had fire, which also makes sense because it's really dark. And if you're going in there and positioning and then burying and then making cross-hatching patterns on the run, you need light. So this is fire control, symbolic etchings and burial hundreds of thousands of years before humans even came up with the idea that you should get rid of that rotting body. So just further challenges. And it's also, I've talked, I do the stories about the different kinds of fire-making last time. Neanderthals and modern humans having different fire kits. Different strategies, yeah. Different strategies, but the sort of knowledge for it had to predate. So now we're also like homo-neleti, which is very separate from a distant, distant, distant cousin, not even as close as humans and Neanderthals. And so when she starts to paint the picture is, if you have all of the overlapping things between different cultures of hominins, chances are it predates, it goes back further. So you've got humans, homo-neleti, Neanderthal, who can make fire, does cave art, buries dead. You start to come up with this list of these are not convergent technology evolutions that are taking place. These must have had the capacity in an ancestor. Yeah. Because there's too many things, like if there was just one over here and one over there, then maybe you can make that argument. But the overlap of all of these abilities and cave art to burial, to fire control and use suggests that all of these things probably go back much further than the split between humans and Neanderthals. And if they're in a nneleti, which is a very distant cousin, then you're going back even further into time when hominins would have been rather intelligent. I think the next thing you're gonna find is homo-neleti may actually have had language. Pretty much there with Neanderthals, like there's no way they could do what they did without language. That still really does depend on their anatomy specifically and what they were capable of. But there are a lot of questions that I do wanna point out that researchers are a bit upset again at the way that this particular researcher is approaching his research. So this work that is currently in the news about homo-neleti is a preprint, but they treated it with three papers. It's three preprints that have, so they are still going through peer review. They have not been accepted for publication yet. And the researchers have been treating them and media with an embargo date. So today or yesterday or whatever it was, was like the day that the news could come out because it was the day that the papers were published on the preprint server. So it was all timed to be a media circus to- For the show. For the show. All for twists. The sensationalist aspect of it. And so researchers are really concerned about the fact that Berger Berger is promoting his work above and beyond the actual science of it and not doing it in the appropriate way. So there are concerns and people do have questions about the sedimentation and how the bones were laid down and the evidence that's been used. But because it hasn't been reviewed, it hasn't been accepted. Yeah, yeah. So my side gig now is writing up studies. And sometimes they seem to be, there's a lot of really bad things that get bad studies that get published. Oh, for sure. They're awful. That can get published still. So I don't think, I think at this point, the credibility of the publishing industry isn't so high that you would care what they say first before, you know what I mean? Like good for them taking ownership of their own research and saying, here's what we found in talking to the public and making it a public spectacle and a big story because that's what is needed. If the publications are whining that they didn't get it first and they wanted to be able to be the gatekeeper for the scientific information, well, your gatekeeping skills suck. Exactly, the publishing industry. You're, you know, that's why entire journal, entire journals full of tens of thousands of published stories every year have just been decredited. Yeah, I mean, and it could also be, it could also be that this researcher is very smart because of, you know, the research is in bioarchive. It is on a public pre-print server so anyone can see the work ahead of time. It is going to be peer reviewed. They have a lot of faith in their results, obviously, to be pushing it through the media before they've been accepted. But at the same time, considering the funding environment for research like this and for, you know, this is the kind of storytelling that is, you know, this is science communication that has a very specific purpose which is to get the story out there in a great way that is led by the scientists themselves and not by the media. And then that conversation can be led by the scientist and can also gather enthusiasm in the public that potentially will lead to philanthropy, funding and a bigger wallet to be able to do future work with. So there is that aspect also. Hey Blair, you look really hungry right now. Oh, I do? Oh yes, so hungry. Would you love to have food prepared by a robot? I guess that's fine. I can't think of a reason that would be a problem other than that you can't taste test it. No, there's no taste testing involved but researchers at Cambridge University have published their work with their robot chef that has learned how to cook. I mean, this is a tentative term for this state of the research but has learned how to cook from watching videos. The researchers took videos of themselves holding up food items like a carrot so that the computer's camera and AI could identify the object and categorize it, classify it and then the human chopped up the carrot and or chopped, did the same with an apple and then put the ingredients together in a number of very simple recipes. So these are like, they're calling them salads but it's like chunks of carrot and apple together. They taught the robot how to put together these simple salads in the way that people learn how to cook by watching YouTube videos. So the idea is that instead of being like programming the robot, this is what you do and they're only programmed to do one particular thing that the robot chef could learn to identify particular foods and in the process and understand how they go together with different ingredients and then potentially be able to make food. Very simplistic at this point in time. Okay, this explains to me why this is different because I was gonna say I have ordered a coffee from a robot before. I did this at the Metrion in San Francisco and so I got an espresso from a robot and the difference is I hit a button for the espresso and that was programmed into the arm. So it knew what to do based on a button that I pushed. So that's a very straightforward code as opposed to this arm watched a bunch of videos. And learned how to cook. Learned that this orange object. I'm gonna put giant air quotes on cook though because this is, it's more like you taught it how to put, it's almost akin to like, here's how to make something out of Legos. Like take an apple, take a carrot, put them in a bowl. Right, and so yes, this is early, early stages but the idea is that this is a robot and a machine learning system algorithm behind the robot that learns through observation and that that observation could eventually go from these very simplistic videos that are made in the lab to maybe one day a robot like this will view YouTube cooking videos and become, learn to be a chef. Yeah, I think the thing is an apple is an apple, a carrot is a carrot and a blade is a blade, right? And so like those things respond in a pretty consistent way but once you add heat to the equation there's lots of variables you need to adjust as you go no two pieces of any food cook the same under the same level of heat. And so yeah, that gets way more complex once you actually put what I consider cooking into the equation, which is heat, right? So. I have a one who would be happy to have a chef that doesn't taste my food before I get it. That sounds gross. Also, I think I would only want a vegetarian robot cook. I'd just be afraid that it would misidentifying meat would be, could be dangerous. It's in there with the knives. Yeah. And it's like, come here. No, no, no, no, no, you don't even, I need to come over a little closer. No. It is important. You're mixing up cooking with butcher rolls, which are very different. Very different. But the question is, if a robot chef is going to be identifying various ingredients in front of it for some kind of cooking that it's supposed to be doing, how does it identify the difference between a carrot and a sweet potato? How does it identify the difference between a lemon and an orange? There are a lot of very nuanced differences in food items. There are differences. And also if it's going to be learning from viewing videos, YouTube videos, very often hands obscure the actual food that's being cooked. So that makes it difficult for identification to take place. The most important part is always missing from the YouTube videos that I would want the robot for, which is cleaning up. Cleaning up your mess. I'll cook my own food as a fun part. It's the cleaning up that's really a drag. That's what I want the robot to do. I still want my child to learn that. 12 year olds, it's hard. This is This Week in Science. We hope that you are enjoying the show. We're having a really good time here ourselves. We're cooking with science. Yeah, okay. If you are enjoying the show, please share it with a friend today. Make sure you tell someone you care about that they should listen to twists or that they should watch twists. Get it on your mobile device right now. Bring it up and share it with somebody you care about and because twists will care about them too. We care about the science in their lives. Also, if you want to help support twists, head over to twist.org. Click on the Patreon link and choose your level of support to help support the ongoing production of twists. Become an executive producer of the show. $10 and more a month, and we will thank you by name at the end of the show. We really can't do this without you. Thank you for all of your support. Okay, coming on back to More This Week in Science. It's time for, oh yeah, yeah, it's that time. It's that time. Blair's Animal Corner. With Blair. Buy pet, live a pet, no pet at all. If you wanna hear about this animal, she's your girl. Except for giant pandas and squirrels. What you got, Blair? Oh my goodness. Do you want a fun story or some bad news first? Yeah, I think I always prefer the bad news first. Eat the frog. Eat the frog? Eat the frog, yeah. Do the hard thing first. Got it, okay. I was like, I don't, I do actually have a story about frogs eating beetles later, so I got very confused. Anyway, okay. So yeah, let's talk about the bad news. Essentially our conservation efforts are messing things up. Specifically in Australia, this is a study looking at the oily, which is a small marsupial that hops around, also called brush-tailed bettongs. They're really important to the environment in Australia. They improve soil health through digging. A single oily could turn over about five tons of soil every year. So they're pretty important, but they were once abundant across Australia and you guessed it, they're now endangered due to all the same reasons all of the marsupials are in Australia. Habitat loss, but also cats and foxes. Those darn cats are just eating so many delicious, tiny marsupials. This is why Australia and New Zealand really are not fans of outdoor cats. It's because they're really, yeah, they're not good for the native species. Anyway. Wailies are so cute. Yes, show us some pictures. Goodness, I've got some pictures of these. They've got little round ears and long tails. They're like a little rat possum. Yeah, a lot of Australian animals, I think could be called little rat possums. Anyway, yes, Wailies, they're cute. They're important, they're disappearing. And so as we do with many endangered species, people have set up what in Australia they call conservation havens. We could call them refuges or protected areas or any number of things. But basically they're fenced in or on offshore islands. They're predator free and they're a space where the idea is you can breed a bunch of these guys at once. There is very little selective pressure so you can get a really good population going and then you can release them into the wild. There's a lot of conservation programs like this that happen all over the world. What's wrong with it? It sounds great. Yes, it's actually, it makes a lot of sense. It's something that it follows if you think about the way this all works. But despite the fact that their populations have increased greatly inside the havens and they think that overall about 13 extinctions in Australia have been avoided over various mammals because of these havens. The issue is exactly what's so great about them. There's little selective pressure. So they examined through 10 years of monitoring that inside the haven where there were no predators, competition for food was the biggest pressure. That was pretty much the only selection on these guys. So in that case, bold care free oilies ate before more cautious ones. Can you guess why that might be a problem? That would actually select for a behavior that might be more likely to get them eaten in the wild. Be a wild. Yeah, so it's great in that particular situation but other, yeah, in the wild, not adaptive. So the issue is, yes, you are allowing for a large population to grow but you are not providing realistic selective pressures that they will then face in the real world. And so in just four generations, oilies born inside havens became kind of more bold but also smaller and their feet became shorter. The- Their feet became shorter? Yes, so the- Why is it important? Yeah, it takes energy to build big feet and if they don't have to get away from predators in a hurry, they don't need them. Yeah. It's like, oh, it's like the little, it's like little feet. Yeah, okay, anyway, yes. Yes, and so in general, it looks like they had a dampened response to predators. One of the big ones that they do, which actually a lot of marsupials do, is they will inject their young from their pouch to distract predators while they escape, which sounds really like a big bummer, but it is essential to the survival of these animals if it is life and death. And so if they're not doing that, then yeah, I know it's- That is the worst thing I've ever heard an animal doing. Yep, so they can escape, yes. Ah, don't leave me here, take my baby instead. If you are a marsupial and you have a helpless baby in your pouch, the baby cannot survive without you. No, hey. So if your choices are- No, you run away faster. If your choices are you both die, or the baby dies, you run away and you can reproduce again. So evolutionarily. We could have run that, reproduce another day. That goes against every mammalian instinct that I have. But according to marsupial instinct, it's actually a way- I'll have more babies. So anyway, pull a baby out of my pocket, throw it in the predator. It's great. What this all means is that first of all, in just a few generations, they lost their anti-predator defenses. So if you know that going into conservation efforts, then you can know that you can't have multiple generations in a row living in these havens or refuges or protected areas or whatever you wanna call them. The other thing is that this means you need to expose these protected animals to- To predation or threat, yeah. Yes. Now, do you wanna expose them to cats? No, those are not natural predators. But can you include natural predators in your space or can you train them to recognize predators? There's other research happening with that where like they're training Australian animals to recognize and avoid cane toads, for example. So there's lots of potential options here, but essentially it's not enough to give them a coddled experience and then release them into the wild. You have to assess and give them a real realistic life in those havens so that they are set up for success when they leave. Hey, hey, are you all right? Are you, is everything okay? Yeah, yeah, I'm fine. Dingo took my baby. Yeah, gosh. I gave a Dingo my baby. I gave it to him. Oh no, Dingo took it right, no, no, no, I gave it to him. This is weird, the baby. How about, how about create havens that keep out the invasive predators? Yeah. How about we remove the invasive? Yeah, get rid of all the cats. Yeah, keep them inside. Keep them inside. Anyway, moving on. So important information for the future of conservation efforts, what we have been doing may have been wrong, but the more we know, the better we can do it. The more you know. Anyway, moving on, you're correct. I wanna talk more about mimicry. So mimicry, yes, is a huge field of zoology looking at all the different kinds of mimicry that exist in the animal kingdom. I wanna talk about one that was really kind of unusual that I wanted to bring up because I hadn't really ever thought about it. So usually you hear about conspicuous body colors from one animal who's poisonous or venomous or dangerous in some way. And then another animal mimics that color so that they can benefit from the danger of this other species. So I might not be poisonous myself, but I'm bright red, like the tomato frog. And so the animals avoid me as well, even though I'm harmless, right? So this is a common form of mimicry, but in this case, this is looking at bombardier beetles, bombardier beetles, bombardier beetles, whatever you wanna call them. They are an insect that ejects toxic chemicals at a temperature of 100 degrees Celsius to repel enemies like frogs. No. Really? Yes. That's wild. I knew that existed. Yeah, so it's toxic and hot. Meanwhile, a type of assassin bug, serthenia flavipase. It doesn't do anything, does it? No, it does. So that's what makes this really weird. It exhibits a conspicuous body color that is very similar to the bombardier beetle, but they also have a defense mechanism. So these guys both have reason to look scary. They both have reason to warn predators. And for some reason, they look the same, or similar, similar, very similar color. Similar, similar colorings. So to a frog, you're gonna go, that doesn't look delicious. Those both look brown and black. I don't like it. Yeah. Yeah, so the assassin bug actually can inject toxic, it's like a whole thing. They're really nasty, they're very stabby. And so researchers set out to kind of figure out how this happened. Who's mimicking who? Is it a coincidence? What is the benefit if they both have their own very effective defense mechanism? Why on earth would they look the same? And so they grab some frogs, some pond frogs, which normally will attack both of these, the beetle and the assassin bugs. And they expose these frogs to one or the other, and then the other. And so among the frogs, 100% of them rejected the Bombardier beetles, 75% rejected the assassin bugs. So initially, the expectation there is that the Bombardier beetle is better defended against frogs than the assassin bugs. And then they switched it up, they showed them the other one. So frogs that had previously encountered one were less likely to attack the other, always. Oh, look at him go, bleh. Oh, no, thank you. Yucky, no, get me away. And so if they had previously seen an assassin bug, they decreased their rate of attack on the Bombardier beetle from 75% to 21%. So very effective. But if they encountered the Bombardier beetle first, their rate of attack on the assassin bug went from 91% to 40%. So in both cases, a drastic change if they found one over the other. So this really seems like a mutualistic thing where they're like, hey. Yeah, straight in category. We live in the same area. We're both spicy, if we look the same. We're spicy. Animals will try to eat us less. Yeah. So I think it's really wild. I've never really heard of this before that two animals who have their own defense mechanism are kind of benefiting from the strength in numbers. Yeah. That makes perfect sense. It's actually amazing that you don't see it more. I'm still tripping out very hard over the 100 degrees Celsius because what is it, like 80 degrees Celsius or something's already boiling? Like, you can make a cup of tea at 80 degrees. So this is probably an exothermic chemical reaction where the beetle is putting together, mixing some chemicals and expelling them very quickly so that the beetle itself isn't containing this liquid. Yeah, it's probably chemical. But that's still very remarkable. It's incredible. Oh, yeah. It's very cool. Not just scalding, but burning. That's what's so crazy is it's not enough that they are able to have this burning, stinging sensation. They're like, no, no, no. I'm also going to make sure to look like this other guy. So then I really want to know, and I don't know how we can figure this out in the fossil records. It's going to be so difficult to figure out. But like, who ended up looking like who? Like, who looked like this first? And then the other one was like, oh, yeah, yeah, like that, like that. At what moment did these two insects end up looking similar? And yeah, and who copied who? I'm just so curious. Or is it just nobody was copying anybody, but it just happened that way? Maybe. Right. It's just they were both speckled brown and black. And the ones that looked similar to each other did a better job of surviving. So it just kind of spontaneously happened, which is totally possible. Right, if they had the same background that they were living in and hiding in, selection could have taken care of them. Right, right, all sorts of that, yeah. Yeah, but it is also possible that one of them looked like this first. And the other one, it just so happened that the assassin bugs that looked like these beetles fared better, and then they slowly started looking more and more like them. That is also possible. And I'm just so curious. So wait a second. I mean, that's basically right. That's how mimicry works in the first place. It's not that one tried to look like the other one. No, yes. Because it looked like the other one, it didn't get preyed on, and so that looked stuck. And the ones that ventured off from that look, they got eaten, so they got taken out of the gene pool. You have two. They're just reinforcing each other for that look. And so, yeah, that makes sense. Yes, so either is possible. So yes, I'm very curious what order this all happened in. And if it did, in fact, happen at the same time, that's also fascinating. But so there's a new kind of mimicry on the block. That is a mutualistic mimicry, yes, where they're both honest. How about that? They're both honest in their warning coloration. I'm going to hurt you. Yeah, I'm very spicy. Don't bite. Don't bite me. That's what twist is. We're very spicy, but you do want to listen. Justin, now that you have a big sip of coffee, want to tell me about the science that you brought for this segment of the show? All right, so I'll do my quick stories now. Collective property rights leads to secondary forest growth in Brazilian Amazon. This is published in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Researchers found that collective property rights, this is local stakeholders, these are indigenous territories of the Amazon, lead to higher reforestation rights. So the team compared secondary forest growth inside indigenous territories to the secondary forest growth on the land directly outside. And there's a couple problems with this study in just how they had to formulate it. Secondary growth is much greater actually in territories outside of indigenous territory. Because inside indigenous territory, you don't have the slash and burn tactics. So there isn't a secondary forest. There's just the primary forest. There's the forest. So they had to find areas that were basically taken over by indigenous populations that had been clear cut. And compare those to the area just outside that territory so they were looking at the same environmental conditions. Even though by being adjacent to the indigenous territory, those forests probably fare better than territory that was far away from there. So they found a 2% to 5% increase in growth. And they found trees that were much older and so more robust on the inside of the indigenous territories in the fairest version of this test that they could have given the non-indigenous territories, if that makes sense. So this is really amazing. There's 726 indigenous territories. Covers 13.8% of Brazil, but it's about a quarter of the Amazon, which then goes and extends into other countries. There are more than 250 indigenous groups. They speak more than 150 distinct languages. Currently, there are 400 and something that have established territories. Because there's a, and the rest are sort of in the process of becoming official. Because there's this, in the Constitution in Brazil, back in the 80s, they created something called the, let's see, indigenous people's statute that legally protects people who have lived in the Amazon for tens of thousands of years. To have some sovereignty over the regions that they inhabit. Meaning, yeah, the government can still decide that, hey, we discovered oil or gold and we're going to go dig. But the indigenous population can say, no, we're not going to allow farming in. No, we're not going to let logging in. No, we're not going to let you turn this into cattle grazing land by cutting down our trees. So they have legal power over big aspects of how that land is used. Very important, first of all, there's the civil rights of indigenous peoples involved. There's also the carbon sequestration that is so crucial in the Amazon. The Brazil has been doing a fantastic job of secondary growth and protecting lands in their commitments to things like Kyoto. On the other hand, it's been able to do that. Even though Brazil's gotten a bad name for deforestation. Well, so part of how they're able to do that is because they've done so much deforestation that they have a lot of land that they can say they're now protecting. Right, right. That they're rehabilitating. So they could be net nothing different in the course of a couple of decades, basically, by saying they're now protecting land that they had just clear cut the decade before. That's all word solid when it comes to government commitments. Because again, governments have committed to planting forest restoring for us, protecting for us. That would be 20% larger than all of Europe or 30% larger than all of continental United States. What is it, the 30 by 30, 30% of the land surface by 2030? Yeah, half of farming, like the commitments they've made are absolutely ridiculous. Also, as a note worthy, there's a giant portion of our pharmaceuticals that are derived from compounds in Amazon plants. It's something like 25% of the drugs we're still using are derived from the Amazon. So it's a resource in a lot of ways. 40%, sorry, about 40% of pharmaceuticals are derived from plants. Most of those were discovered in the Amazon and there's likely more to be discovered if we don't cut it all down. So basically, though, the take home from all this is that when indigenous peoples are taken into account and their land use and land rights is taken into account, you have sustainable beneficial effects on the forests. Which we've also found in wildlife in Canada, when that's taken place, caribou rebound under indigenous controlled territories at much greater rates than they would anywhere else. So anyway, thankfully, Brazil's constitution has an indigenous peoples statute that legally protects people who have lived in the Amazon for the tens of thousands of years. My last story is Brazil's Supreme Court is expected to issue a ruling today or have started looking at it today. They're maybe gonna issue the ruling this week. That seeks to challenge Article 231 of Brazil's constitution, which as it turns out is the one that gives indigenous rights. The right to claim lands they have traditionally occupied. According to an article in Science, the challenge to indigenous rights is being brought by farmers, loggers, miners and other groups, although in reality, it's probably not the workers, the farm workers, the lumberjacks or the mine workers. It's the corporations who are behind them who want to send their workers into these lands to exploit resources who live nowhere near them. And it will never set foot on that land. I've been pushing for legislation to reinterpret the constitution. And one of the requirements they have is that they would require all of the tribes to prove that they occupied those lands in 1988 or whatever it was when the constitution was signed. Now, interestingly, proof that people were forced off of lands is not part of the new legislation. Yeah, I feel like that's usually pretty well documented. Yeah, it is, it is. But they're not taking that into account. That's not gonna be taken into account. They just want to say, hey, in 1988, we'll just stop right there when this was made alive. And so there have been hundreds of new indigenous territories added since then and expansions of lands, adoption of what's called the Marco Temporal, Marco and then timeframe of this, Marco Temporal, that's what it is, what this legislation is being called, could leave 87, what is it, up to 1 million square kilometers unprotected and negatively impact 95% of indigenous territories. Also, of course, argument rights, violation. So look for that in the news, Marco Temporal. Yeah, look for that. I wonder how much we'll be hearing about that one. Well, I'll be sure to vote for, oh, I don't live in Brazil. Maybe our Brazilian listeners will be. But if you've ever wondered whether or not industry is going to help in the fight against global warming, the answer is, no. Why would you wonder that? If anybody was, like, because you might see an advertisement. Unless it's emerging industries. A big corporation is talking about all of the good things it does for the environment. Greenwashing, it's always, always. Yeah. Corporations. But they might not publish that study that says that their chemical is gonna end up everywhere on the planet and not break down. I don't trust those people, corporations. No, okay. All right, moving on to the last few studies of the night. I have a couple of studies. Let's talk about not the drugs that come out of the Amazon, but related to our personal, private health, our genomes. Very often we donate DNA to or genomic samples to large studies with the implicit assumption and usually with the wording from researchers that there's absolutely no way that anybody can identify this data from anything else. They are not gonna be able to do that. Well, there is a new study that's just published in scientific reports called large-scale proteomic studies create novel privacy considerations. Wanna know why they create novel privacy considerations? Well, these large-scale proteomic studies aren't looking at your genome. They're looking at the proteome. What's the proteome? The proteome is a set of all proteins that are produced. So it's the, wait, wait, wait. So it's the proteins. These researchers were able to show that a machine learning system that was trained on proteomic data was able to track the proteomic data back to individuals when that proteomic data was associated with genomic data. Individual DNA level identification. These researchers go on to say that based on their scan of 1.3,000 proteomes that did what they say is a naive Bayesian approach to the genomes for 2,812 independent subjects, they correctly linked 90 to 95% of proteomes to the correct genome. And for 95 to 99%, they were able to identify the 1% most likely links. They did find that they specifically had to have training sets with increased diversity to be able to improve the accuracy of identification of subjects with African ancestry. Not everybody has African. You go far enough back, but specifically like African-American with larger profiling, they were able to, with specifically in the atherosclerosis, excuse me, let me say this word, atherosclerosis risk communities, correct identification was greater than 99% even in mixed ancestry populations. So when they looked at very specific single nucleotide polymorphisms, they were able to like draw these mutations back to very specific individuals. They linked proteomes to proteomes and used the proteomes to determine features like sex, ancestry, and first degree relatives as well. Wow, I'm surprised. Yes. I am very surprised by this. I'm shocked as well. This is amazing. This is ridiculous. This is, what? See, and I feel like I raised concerns about this and I think I have been told by many people that I was being silly. And part of the thing that is, part of the thing that made me skeptical about this is that your body can make 10 to 20,000 different proteins based on genome. Yep. And then there's alternative splicing and editing and all sorts of stuff that goes on downstream that turns that into the 500,000 that your body needs to live. Right, but because it's so specific, the mutations that lead to particular proteins or to, and so the protein association to genetic loci within the DNA is accurate. Yeah, it's accurate enough that they're able to make very accurate predictions of identity. Right, and so it just, and then the next thing that occurs is like, yeah, individuals are going to have variants in different places. And if you say that's a variant, not a splice, then it narrows down that pool considerably and then you have 500,000 proteins that can have little signatures intermixed amongst them that something like machine learning would be able to backtrack and to who that comes from. Yeah, so when you're spitting in a tube for your ancestry.com relations or your 23andMe DNA where it's only single nucleotide polymorphins and they're like, this is private data and nothing will ever be identifiable down the line, especially if we donate the data for scientific research, you know, they'll never track anything back to you. Well, your proteins, if at some point your proteins are analyzed, it can be tracked back, specifically, very accurately. This is incredible. I don't have a criminal past. Darn it. And so. Do you say that? Is it you say this? But do you have a criminal future? That's the question. I know maybe I'm going to have to cancel all my future crime plans because. Cancel it. Now I'm kind of on the record. I've done all those ancestry testing things. Is a pale human with a big brain floating in milk going to identify you as a perpetrator of a future crime and your DNA is the only way. Yeah, we'll know who it is. Yeah, anyway, they say they say they're finding suggest an immediate need to change policy regarding non-genomic data used for research or commercial use, I think. Yeah, anyway, it's an interesting development there. Thanks, machine learning. You're awesome. Large scale association techniques are incredible. Yay. OK, I think I'm feeling a little anxiety. Maybe that's going to make me depressed. And then I need to take psychedelics to treat my depression. I mean, you start to cry. That was going to do that anyway. I think it's fine. You're good. So research we've talked about on the show over the years has suggested that like that LSD and psilocybin can be potent antidepressants. However, they come with side effects. Yeah, especially if you do them both together. Hallucinating, yes. But the hallucinations are something that not everybody enjoys. So researchers have been working very, very hard to figure out where these psychedelics touch the brain, where they connect with the brain, what do they, what receptors do they bind to, and how does that impact hallucinating? Not hallucinating. Antidepressant properties, not antidepressant properties. And so this research group, Publishing in Nature Neuroscience, they had previously reported a study comparing fluoxetine and ketamine and showed that the, and I've talked about that on the show previously, that ketamine acts by binding to a particular receptor in the ends of the neurons in the synapse called the TRKB receptor. This is a receptor for brain-derived neurotrophic factor, which is a brain growth neuroplasticity receptor. It starts when BDNF gets turned on. It starts all sorts of synaptic plasticity actions. So the synapses want to reach out and touch another synapse and make all sorts of new connections. And that's great for your brain and for your functioning as a social human being. So that was great. And so then they're like, let's move on to other drugs. And so in this study, they didn't give drugs to any humans, but in a dish, they did compare how lysergic acid, dimethylamide, LSD, and psilocybin connect to that TRKB receptor as well. And they found that psilocybin and LSD, they bind with a thousand times the affinity than SSRIs, than the fluoxetine, even than ketamine. A thousand times better at binding to this BDNF receptor, the TRKB receptor. They also overlap. They found that the domain of the binding at the membrane of these nerve synapses, that where it binds, overlaps kind of with where the fluoxetine, the normal antidepressants that we use bind with the receptor. But they don't match up exactly. And so the LSD and psilocybin don't need to activate the 5-HT receptor, which is a serotonin receptor. If you've ever taken 5-HT, 5-HTP, you're taking something that can, that can impact your serotonin levels. And so the most of the SSRIs, we know that they act on this 5-HT receptor. We know that LSD does act on the 5-HT receptor, but it doesn't have to. It can have its antidepressant effects without binding. So if you just mutate things just a little bit, they are separate, but different. And so they found that they can target, so basically the research suggests that they can target TRIK B as the target for antidepressant effect. If they try to create something that's like LSD or like psilocybin, but doesn't also bind on to the 5-HT receptor that only binds to that TRIK receptor. And if it does that, then you can have a drug that will lead to a thousandfold improved antidepressant effect with no hallucinatory impacts as well. And really, like hallucination to me is too strong of a word. Optical illusions, little optics going on there for sure, but hallucination is a little... It's hallucination. It can be, yes. It's a little... But it's cool, new drugs. Maybe they will, maybe it'll lead to improvements in how we treat depression in the future. And maybe instead of having to have somebody guide you through a psilocybin or LSD journey to be able to have that therapeutic effect, maybe it will be something that you can get a week's worth of pills, and then you'll be fine. And by the way, the unguided, it's also pretty good. This was a... Be your own anchor. Well, this is an old experiment, but they apparently experimented with prisoners in LSD, which I can't imagine that'd be like the worst place to ever wanna be doing LSD would be in prison. But it severely reduced recidivism rates. People who did LSD in prison were like, ah, I don't know if it was because of the LSD, it was because of paying too much attention to stuff or they got just flipped the switch, but they were like, I'm not going back. Nope. Nope. Don't wanna do that again. Put things in perspective. I like not being in a concrete box. Yeah. Speaking of concrete. Stop doing crime. Yeah, let's stop that. Let's not do that again. No more crime. But speaking of a concrete box, how about putting a pigeon in a little tiny fMRI machine to study its brain while it's sleeping to see whether or not birds dream? Yes, let's do it. Well, researchers did it. Oh, they've already done it. They've already done it. Well, what they did. I'm guessing, yes. Pigeon dreams? Pigeon dreams, yes. What they discovered is that yes, indeed, pigeons do dream. So the question is what they are dreaming of. And so they were able to raise a small number of pigeons from fledglings so that they were then able to take the pigeons and easily put them into an fMRI machine where the pigeons would fall asleep and they could be monitored during their sleep to see the rapid eye movements and also to have their brain imaged and scanned to have that activity level, those activity levels while sleep occurred. They were able to train the birds and get them into the fMRI machine and observe the rapid eye movement over a number of different, oh, I'm not, I have to, I am screen sharing. Yay, I have other things to share. And they were, so they were able to, I think first off, have the resolution to be able to look at the brain is pretty amazing. And what they were able to see is that a significant amount of the brain activity was in areas during the REM sleep related to the wings. So the blood flow that occurred in the brain was a lot of motor areas related to flight. And so the researchers think that pigeons dream of flying. So these pigeons don't just fly, they dream of flying. But not only that, there were also indicators that the amygdala was active as well. So there's a suggestion that the birds were emotionally stimulated or their brains were emotionally active as they were dreaming of whatever flights they were taking. So are these predator dreams, are there, what's happening in the bird's limbic system is similar to actually what happens with humans. We dream about, we have emotional dreams. We have movement-based dreams. We have all these things that go together to help us put scenarios in place for the future and to consolidate memories from the past. Yeah, other interesting aspects additionally relate to, like when we sleep, one of the ideas is that the brain, not only during REM sleep, but when you're not having REM sleep, that the brain is also going through a period of waste removal, right? So you're sleep and there's a lot of blood flow and that that blood flow is gonna carry out waste metabolites and a lot of other stuff and that there's stuff leaving your brain and sleep is the time of day when that's possible. It can't do it any other time of day. And in mammals, it's constant, our cerebrospinal fluid and brain transfer, it's like happening constantly. There's a 100% cerebrospinal fluid turnover and there's a big waste removal that occurs during that period of time. But in pigeons, apparently that's not the way it works. So in pigeons, when they were dreaming, they were not waste removing and when they were not dreaming, that's when the brain had a lot of blood flow that was actually like taking the cerebrospinal fluid and cleaning it all out. And they say that there were some compromises that might have been occurring to allow it to be an effective process that the REM cycles are shorter than they are in most mammals. So they're like, they dream for a shorter period of time and waste removed for a shorter period of time. So it's the cyclic aspect of it was shorter in nature. So maybe there's more on off as opposed to on dreaming and we're waste removing a little bit. And oh, no, I'm not dreaming and we're still waste removing a bit. And yeah, there are interesting questions about all this though, but yeah. Do either of you ever fly in your dreams? I have not, I don't really fly in my dreams, no. Yeah, I can't. I have, gravity still works perfectly. Sometimes. I've heard of people though who can fly when they dream. I was just wondering if maybe the pigeons ride bicycles. Right, do they do other things? Drive cars. They're dreamy. Can you ride a bicycle in your dreams? No, I can't, no, I don't know what it is. All I can do is fly in my dreams. Yeah. I don't know if they still can't translate it. Or maybe if you teach a pigeon to ride a bike, does it then dream of riding a bike? Oh, then. Anyway. Does my dog dream of flying also? I see her doing this. What is happening? Right? Oh, your dog is running. I'm going on another walk. We're going to go on another walk. She's chasing something good. And sometimes she's eating her mouth. Yeah, but this is the first time that REM sleep has been tracked back to specific areas of the brain for brain activation. In pigeons that confirm that, yes, indeed, pigeons don't just sleep and have eye movement. They also dream. And they're dreaming probably of flying. And they're excited or scared about it. And they're emotional anyway. Anybody, any animals that have memory storage probably dream, right? Any animal that goes through REM sleep probably dreams. Yeah. Sorry, we're not special. We're not special. Not in the dream department. And I just I love finding out, though, it's like, yes. If you have ever wondered what a bird dreams of, they dream of flying. Yeah. No surprise there. In the Justin Jackson theory of how everything can't be convergent, that would mean, wouldn't it, a dinosaur's dreamed? Yes. And that is, yes, I would suggest that our common ancestor probably dreamed. Yeah. T-Rex dreamed of going. I mean, mammals were already around today. You have to go back even further. I don't know, then do we know a fish dream? Do fish dream? I would assume, yes. I don't know if they even sleep. I don't even know how that works. Oh, they do. One eye on, one eye off. No, yes. They have eyelids. They might not dream as well. So dinosaurs, dinosaurs, if dinosaurs were dreaming, I wonder what the dinosaurs dreamed about. Hopefully not asteroids. They dreamed of eating those scurrying little mammals at their feet that were so annoying. Little did they know. Little did they know. Have we done it? Have we finally reached the end of our stories? You've done it. We've done it, we've done it. I have one final just tack on to the end of the show here as I go into my big thank yous to everyone for joining us for another episode of This Week in Science. As I'm digging into our shout-outs, I have one huge shout-out for Gerald Sorrells. Gerald is a longtime listener of twists. Started listening back in like 2010 or something like that, maybe even earlier than that. And has been supporting twists for many, many years. In 2012, we got our first email from Gerald when he told us that twists was influential in his decision to become a science educator. And then he updated us in 2017 when he received his associate's degree after spending several years working two jobs and putting all the classes together to be able to finish that degree. And at that time in 2017, he was planning to attend a program to receive a Bachelor of Science in Teaching Biology for secondary school. And this past week, we got another email. Gerald wrote in and said, hey guys, after helping my wife become a nurse, having a baby daughter and moving three states, I finally became a science teacher as promised to twists so many years ago. Awesome. So awesome. I started last year in November and it's been such a roller coaster that I never had a chance to properly update you guys. And I also wanted the time to prove myself to you. High schools across the nation are desperate for science teachers and the science department I joined is no exception. They are a great team, but they are understaffed and overstrained. Full-time science teachers were grading students that weren't even their own students. Substitute teachers were stand-ins for anatomy and earth environmental because there was simply no teacher there to give lessons. Workloads were massive. They were very relieved that there was some kind of help. The simple fact is that they would never have had the relief if it wasn't for twists. It's you guys that put the idea in my head so many years ago on my way to a bank job. Thank you from all of us to Dr. Kiki, Justin and Blair. And he attached a photo of himself that he then is, let's see if I can get this picture up here for the viewers. And he attached a photo to say, this photo is from January 9th, 2023 of the twist logo that I had brought that day long ago on stage for my MDC graduation for the bachelor's degree. It's there for all the students, parents, teachers and administrators to see framed by the door as they came and went. If anyone asked why I became a science teacher, I just pointed to twists framed on the wall. Keep on trucking, guys. You're all great. You're changing and informing minds a week at a time. Mr. Surrell's Science Educator, North Carolina. That's amazing. Thanks for listening, Gerald. And thanks for enlightening and educating our nation's youth. I know. I mean, I've got goosebumps. When I first read this email, I just, I sat and I cried for a minute. It's honestly this kind of thing that, you know, hearing about impact that keeps us going a lot, but also just to the time and effort that and determination it took for you to become a teacher and just you're inspiring. And thank you for your dedication to science education and for passing along your curiosity and wonder to the next generation, you know, maybe of twist listeners. No. Hey, and yeah, I got to ask, hey, the rest of you that have been listening. What have you been doing? What have you been doing? What have you been doing? You know, there are things, somebody needs to be, we need more science educators, obviously, get out there. Yeah. So Gerald, I hope you and your story, that you've worked so hard to get where you are and we are so, so proud of you and just honored that you've shared this journey with us through the years and how cool that, you know, you've got that, the twist logo up. That's just so fun. Yeah. Thank you for all your support through the years and, you know, this is a symbiosis, I think. I think we're all sharing with each other here and I hope that your journey can help other people maybe pick up the inspiration to take a step in a similar manner. But it's now the end of the show. So Gerald, thank you so much for writing in and shout outs as usual. Go to FADA for your help with show notes and with the story show descriptions. Thank you for the social media work that you do. Gord, Arun, Laura, thank you for manning our chat rooms and keeping places safe and happy to hang out for all of our viewers while the show is going live. Thank you to Rachel for editing the show and identity fourth, even though you're having some studio issues, thank you for being there and recording the show week after week. It takes a whole team to get this thing done. And of course I would be remiss if I didn't thank as usual our Patreon. Sponsors! 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Thank you all for your support on Patreon. And if you want to support us on Patreon as well, head on over to twist.org and click on that Patreon link on next week's show. We will be back Wednesday, 8 p.m. Pacific Time, and again Thursday, 5 a.m. Central European Time broadcasting live from our YouTube and Facebook channels as well as twist.org slash live. Yes. Hey, do you want to listen to us as a podcast perhaps we'll get ready for bed preparing for your nightly dream of flying? Just search for this week in Science if her podcasts are found. If you enjoyed the show, get your friends to subscribe as well. For more information on anything you've heard here today, show notes, links to the stories are available on our website, www.twist.org. And you can also sign up for a newsletter. Is there a button? You can contact us directly as well. Email Kiki at Kirsten at thisweekinScience.com, Justin at twistminionandgmail.com, or me Blair at BlairBazz at twist.org. Just be sure to put twist, T-W-I-S in the subject line or email will be spam filtered into an Einstein ring and we won't read it for, I don't know, a couple hundred million years at the minimum. Minimum. Maybe longer. Billion? Billions of years. Yeah. Especially with cosmic expansion. Yeah. Currently, we are not on any social media. We're contemplating ending all social media. And tell there's a good one again. We're on Facebook, we're on Instagram. Yeah, we're on YouTube. We're on Twitter if you can find us, but it wouldn't even load my tweet today. Yeah, I don't know what happened, but it went bad. It went bad. You don't know, I have an idea, but, you know. Yeah, but we still want your feedback. So if there's a topic you would like us to cover, address the suggestion for an interview, Haiku that came to you in the night, email it to us. Yeah, we will be back here next week. I hope mail works. And we hope you'll join us again for more great science news. And if you've learned anything from the show, remember. It's all in your head. This week in science. This week in science. This week in science. This week in science is the end of the world. So I'm setting up a shop, got my banner unfurled. It says the scientist is in, I'm gonna sell my advice. Show them how to stop the robots with a simple device. I'll reverse all the warming with us coming your way. So everybody listen, I use the science. This week in science. This week in science. This week in science. Science. Science. This week in science. This week in science. This week in science. Science. Science. Science. I've got one disclaimer and it shouldn't be news. That's what I say may not represent your views, but I've done the calculations and I've got them. Justin will back in just a moment. Blair is like, I'm done. Bed time for baby. On non-twist nights, I go to sleep at 8.30. Oh my goodness. I do have a big orange drink. Fada. It's my, it's my B Vibemons. It's bubbly. It's got B Vibemons. It's nice. I enjoy it. It tastes like orange. It's good stuff. Grubby the opossum. Eric Knapp says, speaking of invasive animals, it turns out Grubby the opossum brought kids with her. So we have opossums running loose in Homer, Alaska. Opossums. I mean, they're all over the United States. They're originally from Virginia. That's Virginia opossum. And now they're everywhere. Don't feed them, please. Let nature feed itself. So apparently I didn't know about Grubby the opossum. Grubby, this is from Alaska Public Media. Grubby the opossum wandered into Homer, Alaska, and had been captured and taken to the Alaska Zoo. Grubby arrived in the Kenai Peninsula community in March after hitching a ride in a shipping container from Washington state. Yeah, I guess they, yeah, maybe they're not usually found that far north. Continuous United States only. It says here, the visitor quickly divided the town. Some wanted her captured and killed because opossums don't live in Alaska. But some liked Grubby launching the hashtag, hashtag free Grubby. Oh, Homer police posted a Facebook post of the capture of the, quote, wanted fugitive and somewhat local celebrity. She'll be happier and a more temperate climate for sure. She does not want to be in Alaska. Just take her back to Washington or somewhat local. Yeah. Well, the other thing about opossums that people don't know and is kind of a bummer to tell people about is they live one to three years. Through that short lived. Yes, because they have 13 babies at a time and they can have multiple litters a year. And so they basically reproduced to death. Yeah, good grief. They're they're a boom and bust animal. That's a that's that's interesting. Yeah, I'm fascinating. Yeah, opossums do not last long. Yeah, they do get as far north as Canada, apparently, but don't usually make it to Alaska. It's a bit far for an originally southeastern animal. They're not talking about how long the opossum normally live. But they're saying that Grubby may stay in Alaska. Remaining part of an exhibit on invasive species in the state. So probably what's going to happen is Grubby will live out her life at the Alaskan Zoo and then maybe become stuffed. I don't know. Fascinating, Eric. I had no I had not heard about Grubby. Ah, the Grubby name came from Grubb Stake Avenue where she was first seen. Fascinating. So I wanted to look it up because I it's been a long time since I've done a presentation on opossums. I used to do them all the time. Be. But yeah, we used to have a zoo. Yeah. But yeah, so so they can have five to 13 young at a time. They can start having babies when they're very young and they have they can have babies every every three or four months. So that also means since it takes three months to wean the babies that they can have little jelly bean marsupial babies in the pouch. They can have 13 babies on their back. At the same time, they have this going on at the same time. And they're in a constant rotation. They basically, yeah, they basically just reproduce to death is what they do. It's a good thing they're cute and good at pest control. They're cute when they're young, for sure. They're cute all the way through with those little sharp pointy teeth. And when they get older, they get these like that deposits in the corner of their eyes and there's other things that it's they're not the prettiest when they're older. Who is? Come on. You know, you're right. Oh, I don't know. Don't be age. Don't be age bashing. I won't shame the elderly opossums. All right, well, I'm going to go to pictures. I don't I see pictures of opossums, old opossum. If you look for pictures of old opossum, you don't get pictures of fatty eye bags. Oh, well. I'm going to look for pictures of fatty eye bags. Maybe that'll be the name of my my my skincare line of fatty eye bags. Oh, my God. Sorry. Twists approved. Yeah, the Internet doesn't like to have these pictures. Also, like, wild opossums usually don't get that old. They die when they're like one and a half. Oh, here's some. Do you find some fatty eye bags? Yeah, I did. Of course you did. They were young ones. You're so cute. Remember the first time I saw opossum and opossum? I didn't know I didn't I hadn't I wasn't aware that they existed. I love opossums. I wasn't for some reason. It just missed it in school that day or whatever. And there was one walk in or a long yard in a backyard. And I thought it was the biggest rat. Because they just look like giant rats. That's that's basically what I mean, maybe. People just think that because of the tail. Yeah, a long hairless, fatty eye situation. I can see that. OK, great. I want to stop it. Stop it to anybody. Well, I hope somebody listening to this podcast uses the name fatty eye bags for something because it's a great name. Oh, poor opossums. I think they're adorable. I love them. They are. They're very sweet. They're great education animals, too. Rats are cute. So are rats. Yeah, they're all cute. Squirrels are cute, too. Before you go, Blair. Yeah. I was just wondering if which which one of these these things you like best and I will send them. Oh, my God. Do you like that? Yeah. Yeah. Or do we like where to go? Oh, that was cute. That there's a knitted panda costume. I like this knitted panda costume. Amazing. I feel like the tail of the squirrel costume is very impractical for an infant. It's very large. Who cares? Practical. What are you talking about? Oh, man. Little panda costume. Little I love this squirrel costume. I think this one might be that. Look at this puppy tail. Listen, no matter what you send, I promise to bring him on camera in it at some point. Oh, my God, it will be amazing. Oh, my gosh. It is very cute. Squirrels and pandas. I think maybe that's, you know, how people get known as like, oh, this is what you collect. And everybody buys that thing for you. Yes. I'm going to continue. I'm going to buy you squirrels and panda clothes for your child as long as he will put up with wearing them. Good. Good. Yes. Well, eventually he'll be self-aware enough to know that he can do it as an active rebellion. And I'm really in trouble. Once that begins and the real fun starts. Whatever, mom, I'm going to go put on my panda outfit. You'll see. You'll see. I'll be wearing a panda outfit and you'll love it then. Yeah. Mom. Oh, gosh, that would be such a fun rebellion. But what if I were a panda, mom? Would you love me then? Of course, honey. So I was watching we get a panda in the local zoo and I was watching it. They are amazingly dexteritous with their hands. Where? What do you call it? It's probably why they survived. Like it was it was holding the stick of bamboo and eating off the thing. But it was very casually like just a very casual grip. It didn't look like even like a bear. You would picture to be grabbing something, but it's like I'm bear pying this thing. Panda had like just a grip. I mean, I'm I hate to break to you, Justin, but the panda is a bear. I know this is but this is what surprised me. It's like, I don't I don't think of I don't think of bear paws as being that articulate like the way it was moving the sticks around bamboo with the eat off thing. You've never seen a bear try and manipulate things to get at the termites inside of a tree. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's like a bear paw, bear, bear, bear, bear, bear. This is like a proper grip. Like it was it was had a hand, which is just kind of surprised me. You know, it didn't like like a paw. It was like it was using it just had a hand. It's a good grip is manipulating things like. I'm going to make a salad better than a robo chef. Oh, I'm a panda chef. Make me bamboo salad bamboo shoots. And eat shoots leaves. Can you imagine a salad of only bamboo shoots? They're pretty boring. Yeah, Eric nap does bring up a pretty good point, Justin, which bears can open coolers, bears can open car doors. Yeah, but they but they bear pie. They just swipe. They're swiping it stuff. I think you need to pay a little more attention to some of the smaller bears in the zoo, black bears, spectacled bears, sloth bears, some bears. You need to pay more attention to those individuals and polar bears. That's all I have to choose. Yeah, and polar bears, they have snowshoes. So of course they're not dexterous. Right. But it was I've never seen a bear. And I've seen bears kill seals. Seen bears. That artichoke, like it was just look like it had hands. It was kind of alarming how it does things. Can suddenly a new fear of pandas arrives on the scene at twist, a fear of pandas because of their hands. I'm not smart enough to know what to do with them, but it's fine. Panda hate just has no, no, there's no end. It's very entertaining, very entertaining. They're adaptive radiation that should have ended in extinction. Should have panned it out. But but they survived. They survived Young and Dryas. Lot of lot of there were no pandas in North America. I guess in the northern hemisphere. It was not in the hemisphere, but you're right. It was mostly seems to have impacted North America. But it also, well, no, because it hit because there was a hit over there in Eurasia as well. Maybe it made it all the way over. It's not that far. Panda territory in the Pacific Northwest isn't. Pandas were fine. They're like, I got my bamboo. Yeah, it's good. Survived when I wave my little panda hand at you. Predatory bears did not make it. Prairie bears. Lots of animals lasted for longer and still became extinct because they were not an ideal. Hey. But the way it now, it turns out now that I've learned that the Younger Dryas was a cold snap that killed off the the woolly mammoth that they were living in warmer temperatures, temperatures, but not too unlike what's there now. Hold snap all the way down in Southern California even. Maybe maybe that whole idea that it's too warm for the woolly mammoth and the climate's not right. Maybe that's not as true as we think it is. You're way over simplifying it. But I am. It's all good. It's I don't have the energy to complicate it right now. You're not going to go the other direction. All right, let me take an idea that I have an over complicated. So it's hard to make my point. Now I'm not going to do that. Who would do that? Who would do such a thing? Who would do that? Now he's going to the details first. All right, Blair's tired. She's two hours past her bedtime. Say good night, Blair. Even though she wouldn't have been sleeping, she would have been rolling back and forth going, I'm so uncomfortable. Yes, that's accurate. I can actually sleep. I have I wish I could sleep. It would be really nice if I could sleep. Yeah, I have to get a solid eight hours of that. You see. Yeah. I'm glad we were able to entertain you instead of letting you roll around. Yeah, laning about your sleep. Yeah. Good night, Blair. Say good night, Justin. Or say good morning, Justin. Good morning, Justin. Good night. Good night, everyone. I hope that you have wonderful bird dreams tonight. Sleep well wherever you are. Stay curious. Stay healthy. Stay safe. Oh, wait. Yeah. Stay curious. Come back next week. Get some good rest, Blair. And everybody, I hope you're doing great. It was a nice tight hundred and fifty. End of broadcast.