 Welcome to another episode of this week in science podcast broadcasting live right now. And if you're used to this show, you'll know that right now is the time that we live broadcast the podcast will be edited. Hit all the likes and other things and I'm being told that there's some kind of a problem to Facebook at the moment. I don't know what's going on. Hope it's going. Anyhow, we're here. We're recording. We're streaming the podcast will go and it's time for a show. You ready Blair? So ready. Yes. Ready as I love. Ready. Okay. Let's do this thing. Welcome everyone. All right. Let's start this show. Oops, I hit a button with my finger. Starting the show in three, two. This is Twizz. This week in science episode number 935 recorded on Wednesday, July 19, 2023 science to sing about. Hey everyone, I'm Dr Kiki and tonight on the show we will fill your head with babies at the opera scared flies and missing dark matter. But first disclaimer disclaimer disclaimer. When is a weed a weed human necessity and awareness defines it so as stewards we look upon the world and let it be or understanding our impacts, our essential place in ecology. Do we take responsibility? What does that mean? How do we define it? Are we a weed ourselves or something part and parcel? Let's consider all possibilities on this week in science coming up next. Good science to you, Dr Kiki and good science to you too, Blair and everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of this week in science. We are back again to discuss all the science again without Justin. We hope he's doing well on child duty this week. Hopefully he'll come back sane and happy when he's done. Probably not well rested, but yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, but we've got stories about science as we like to do every Wednesday, 8pm Pacific time. So I have stories about missing dark matter in a galaxy, some issues with private medicine. Did you know babies love opera and then some other brain stuff? I'm looking forward to that. I think that's important to my current interest. I brought multilingual science. I also brought some seaweed, some bats and some scared flies. I like seaweed, dried and salted. It's very tasty. I don't like well maybe scared flies if we can get rid of them. That's the other one. We need some flies. They're pretty important to the ecosystem. It's true. It is true. And as we jump into our flying by the seat of the pants science show, we've planned it all ahead. It's all very good. We want to let you know that you can subscribe to TWIS, to this podcast. Anywhere good podcasts are found, you can also find us broadcasting live every Wednesday, 8pm Pacific time on Facebook, Twitch and YouTube. And we are TWIS Science on most of the socials out there. And our website is TWIS.org. If you want to go check out show notes and other things, it's where everything is held archaively, historically. But now it's time for now for the science. You ready to dive in? Yeah. What do you got, Kiki? Okay. Let's start with the puzzle of missing dark matter. We've had... The dark matter's whole thing is that it's missing. It's one of those things. Where is it? Where's the dark matter? I don't know. Do you know where the dark matter is? I can't see it. Well, we've been trying to figure out where dark matter is in the universe. Our estimates are that it makes up about 4% of the universe is made up of not visible baryonic matter, or it doesn't reflect. You can't really see it, but it's there. It has a gravitational effect. It has mass. And there is an estimate that most galaxies have about 10 to 70% of their mass, of their content made up of dark matter. So some researchers at the University of La Laguna at the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias have discovered that a galaxy called NGC1277 doesn't have that much dark matter. Maybe at most it has about 4% to 5% dark matter, but they didn't really detect any. So they're looking at this galaxy and they're like, oh, it's an old galaxy. It's what they call a relic galaxy. It's kind of... If we're going to look at galaxies and see how galaxies form, fossils, evolutionary, that kind of thing for the solar system, we look at relic galaxies. So they're like, hey, normal is going to be great. This is a prototype. And then it wasn't. And the question is, where did the dark matter go? Right. So did it start with the right amount and now it doesn't have as much? Or did it never have as much? And there's something weird about this that we didn't... Yeah. That's the exact question. So we've seen galaxy clusters in the past where they've blown past each other and gravitationally pulled dark matter away from each other. So that the dark matter is missing in one area and it is increased in another area. But this galaxy, we know that it hasn't interacted with other galaxies, at least in a very, very, very long time. So it's kind of by itself, we don't think it's had any interactions that would have pulled the dark matter away. Is it possible that dark matter just kind of leaks away over time? Huh. We don't know. We're... Okay. We were to go, why would it do that? That doesn't make any sense. Yeah. So it doesn't make any sense at all. And these researchers are scratching their heads and they're really wondering how a massive galaxy could form without dark matter. Or if it formed with dark matter, where that dark matter would have gone. Is this something that suggests that the standard model of physics is not complete? Or is this something that we just don't know enough yet and we can't answer the question? Actually, the answer is we don't know yet. We know nothing, Jon Snow. It sounds like we just picked a bad example to study. Like maybe this galaxy is just weird. Right, but why is it weird? That's the question we need to answer. Why is it weird? Well, I mean, before you said, you said what, 10 to 70% of its masses dark matter? That's a huge range. Yeah. Like if you had the kind of like, what was it called? The box plot with the whiskers? If you have that, like there's an error margin. Getting to four isn't that far. If your range is 10 to 70. Right. Yeah. So there's maybe some wiggle room, but the question is why is it down as an outlier from the outliers? So how is it, how is it where it is? Why is it where it is? Is it, how did it lose its dark matter? They don't know. They just kind of study like a thousand galaxies. Right. I mean, the thing that makes me laugh. Then you can get a better data set and go, is this one actually weird or was our estimate of 10 to 70% off? And yeah, I mean, that's the thing. It's okay. This is supposed to be a prototype relic galaxy prototype. So obviously it's not a prototype. They need to look at other prototype relic galaxies and see if they're consistent with this. Let's do some analysis and see what's going on. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we're not, we're not throwing the standard model out yet, but I love studies like this where it seems really interesting and researchers are scratching their heads. It's good. Yeah. Well, and without being able to go back in time, very difficult to tell if this has changed over time or if it's just, yeah. And like you mentioned at the beginning is like, it's dark matter. We can't see it. We don't really know what dark matter is. We're still like, oh, maybe it's lost in the dust and the gas and the filaments between galaxies between, you know, maybe it's just fluffy out there. In the universe. Or maybe it's stuff that we can't explain yet. And we don't know. Dark matter. They have questions about things that are questionable. Truth. All right. But these researchers who did this study, of course they published it in English. They are not American researchers. They are Latin researchers. And so Blair, you had an interesting piece with that kind of topic to bring. Yeah. So if you and I lived in a country where English was not the primary language, how would we be talking about science? Would we be talking about it in our native language? Or would we be broadcasting in English? What would we do? Well, scientific studies are published in English. English is the language of science. Might that be a problem? This is a study from the University of Queensland, Australia from Dr. Tatsuya Amano. Looking at the impacts of English being the main language of science and how specifically the impacts on non native English speakers on science as a field. And so that their kind of disadvantages can range from difficulties in reading and writing papers to reduce participation in international conferences. And so they surveyed 908 environmental scientists from eight countries with different linguistic and economic backgrounds and compared the amount of effort required by individuals to conduct a variety of scientific activities in English. And what they revealed is not too surprising is that there are clear and substantial disadvantages for non native English speakers. They did twice as much time to read and write papers and to prepare presentations makes sense. But what I think is really scary is that papers written by non native English speakers are 2.5 times more likely to be rejected and 12.5 times more likely to receive a request for revision simply due to the written English. And some of them also give up on attending and presenting conferences because they're not confident communicating English. So, right. Again, not surprising. But what can you do with this information so the bigger picture issue is that these disadvantages are identified. But there's nothing in the scientific community to kind of remove these barriers. Instead it's up to individuals to figure out how to overcome them on their own. And that is where you can really lose a lot of scientific information of brilliant minds. And the thing that comes to mind for me immediately is perspectives. Yeah, because if you only have majority English speaking countries contributing to these round table discussions at conferences, reviewing articles, writing articles, doing all these things, do you end up with a kind of homogenized perspective on the science? And do you miss out on kind of different perspectives? Like how many times have we done stories about like, oh, before women were publishing studies, this whole area of health wasn't looked at because what about the women? What about all the kind of non English speaking countries that have different cultural experiences that could inform scientific studies? I think it's pretty important. So they propose some potential solutions in the paper, including supervisors recognizing difficulties faced by students to journals providing free English editing, which would be pretty cool. And also they suggest funders could offer financial supports to efforts working towards overcoming language barriers. So you could maybe get some additional additional funding to work on your English development. So kind of providing some of those ways to remove barriers and assistance to those to be able to accommodate this universal scientific language of English. Yeah, it's really still working on this idea that English is our global language that everybody has to learn English to be able to communicate. And it does leave a barrier to be crossed, certainly. It's interesting about the paper rejection and that the editors don't work more on looking at the statistics or looking at the results of the studies specifically. And then, you know, finding a copy editor or somebody to help brush up the language or, you know, there's, I don't know, maybe there is something else that most researchers are working at university institutions. And so maybe there's something that can be done for, I mean, this is this is room for science writing, right? This is a room for technical writers to come in for translation purposes. Yep. Yeah, absolutely. So if there could be more kind of institutionalized assistance, that would be huge. But I think, really, I want to learn more about this rejection and revision side of things because this means that process is biased. That's what that means. And if your English isn't exactly right, the science could still be perfect. I mean, science, science is never perfect. But you know what I mean? It could be sound, right? It could be statistically significant. You could be drawing logical conclusions. But if your English is not perfect, are you going to get your paper rejected or are you going to ask for revision? So it's, yeah, I think that's the thing that kind of was the spookiest out of all this for me. But I also just think it's a nice reminder for everybody like, yeah, we're first of all very lucky to be speaking the language of science. So I'm thankful for that. Yeah. I mean, you think about it, though, we've talked before about how science terminology, the actual terms that we use to refer to things. They're usually based in Latin. They're usually very specific roots, which are still Western romance kind of based. But at the same time, science itself is hard to get into because you have to learn how to speak science as a language. You know, so, you know, it's maybe easier for people who have a background in English speaking. But it's, I don't know, it's a very, it's a very interesting question all around. I mean, we shouldn't have barriers. It should happen. But how do we make it possible for people to communicate better? Is this where AI comes in, comes into play? That's interesting. Babelfish. I don't know. Yeah, Google translate. Just write my paper in my native tongue and just have a very garbled translation just delivered to the journal. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. That's a really good question, especially with like the, it's not called Google Glass. What is it? The one that Apple made? Oculus? I don't know. The goggles, the face goggles, the AI face goggles. Computer on my face.com. Yeah. Exactly that. You can potentially wear that in the future and read text in front of you in whatever language you want. Right. So if that's the case, does that make things more accessible and more universal? Yeah. Right now it's interesting that AI is often identified as being written by like papers that are being written by AI are identified as being written by people who don't speak language. English as a native tongue in studies recently. So I think that's another interesting point to it. So many interesting levels. But to your point, if we get our universal translator from Star Trek, none of this matters. Just speak whatever you want. Say what you want. The computer will fix it. Computer. Engage. In communication. One thing that's important to communication is figuring out how to get people to seek out health care when they need it, how to get people understanding what insurance benefits they have. Like our system here in the United States is made to be confusing. Yeah. It's kind of made to help people fail. I'm familiar. There is a study out this last week from the British Medical Journal, BMJ. And it is in relation to private equity firms that have been investing in and basically buying becoming owners of health care companies. So nonprofits or other hospitals or insurance companies are being purchased by private equity because it's a great investment because health care. There's so much money in it right now. Oh my goodness. But there hasn't been a lot of speculation or there is speculation as to its impact, but there hasn't been any research on it to date. And so this study did a review of 55 other studies, 47 in the US from the last couple of decades. And then they found that nursing homes were the most commonly studied settings than hospitals and dermatology facilities and all sorts of quality in the studies, all sorts of methods, all sorts of weird things. So they finally ended up like putting it all together and it's a mixed bag really. Private equity for a large part, though, for nine of 12 studies, they had higher costs to patients or payers at health facilities. Once they became owned by private equity firms, three found no differences, none showed lower cost. There's 27 studies that looked at health care quality and 12 of them found that health care quality went down and it was actually harmful to the patients. Three were studies were beneficial nine were kind of mixed where it was like some things are good. Some things are worse. You're probably just, you know, dealing with efficiency and getting some things, you know, certain outcomes. When they looked at nursing homes, separately, there was a mixed impact, but overall there was a degradation, as opposed to an improvement in quality of care at nursing homes. So fewer staff, less skill, all sorts of things. The result really, they note is the results of this study confirm the need for increased rigorous research on private equity ownership in health care, particularly its impacts on health outcomes and system costs and another non US settings such as Europe. So what you're saying is when you're worried about the bottom line. The quality suffers. Where have I seen this before. Oh, right. Capitalism. You know, but it's one thing to just like have our anecdotes and be like, whoa, American health care, we pay more money and whoa. Health care outcomes are weird and people are in debt and it's like kind of have all this stuff put together. But then when there's an actual, you know, review of research that's done to say here's the data and more often than not when health care is privatized when it becomes for profit. There is a deleterious impact or it doesn't get better. At least it's not it's not better for patients. Yeah. Well, you want to you want to spend less money and make more money. How do you do that? You cut corners and you cut care. Yeah, I mean, it makes sense. Right. Absolutely. And it's another reminder of why that shouldn't be how this works. You know, I just I feel like this is the kind of study that Justin would have brought to talk about on the show. But but I do think it's important to when there are studies like this analysis like this to kind of pin highlight them and we can add them to that corpus of information that we have when we look at the world. And we look at it and go, OK, what's happening? Who am I voting for legislatively? Are there regulations that can, you know, are there legislators who are looking at this? Can I write a letter to my representative? Yeah, what can we do? Yeah, it's a great question in America. I don't know. It's kind of baked into the system. So pretty tough, especially because the kind of the more kind of radical stuff that they were talking about doing with health care here, you were still going to be able to have your private option. So that doesn't really get rid of this issue. But hey, if somebody comes out there and says that they they want to put caps on things and basic standards of care and all these sorts of things and and pay closer attention to to insurance companies, then then yes, then you vote for that person. But I'm not going to hold my breath. Meanwhile, mainly because I won't be able to pay the medical bills right when they show up to take care because I passed out. I hope you didn't pass out. Don't pass out there. No, no, no, no. Don't pass out. Oh my goodness. Let's talk about sex. Oh, yeah, seaweed. Yeah, seaweed sex. Did you know that seaweeds have sex? No, no. Yeah. Think of it that way. Nope. It's a reminder that seaweed is not a plant is not in kingdom plantae. It's a protista. It's an algae. That's right. Yes. That's right. And so they have they they have sex. They have sperm and egg. It's not exactly like animals, but it's more similar to how animals mate than to how plants do that being said, plants on land often use pollinators. They don't talk about them all the time because it's like, you know, our entire lives depend on pollinators and pollinating plants because we eat those. But they can do that by, you know, bees brushing up against getting covered in pollen or there can be seed pods that travel on the fur of animals or they sometimes they're like helicopter shaped and they fly or sometimes seeds can pass through the digestive tracts of animals and then actually germinate via feces. But so on land, we are very well versed in how pollinators pollinators work in concert with plants to kind of this mutualistic relationship. The pollinators get something out of it and the plants get to continue on their family line. Well, it turns out that seaweed, they might have a similar arrangement going on, which is brand new information because up to this point, the expectation was that underwater, the movement of currents and buoyancy disperse and fertilize seaweeds. They're broadcast spawners. That's it. They just release a bunch of sperm. It gets carried along the waves. They somehow find eggs in that giant ocean. And fertilized. And yeah, it's great. It's like a needle in a haystack, but it works every time. Well, new research says there might be pollinators at work underwater, which is pretty cool. So they found some examples of mutualism among seaweeds and animals. This is researchers from the Sorbonne University. They found isopods, which are these tiny little marine invertebrates two to four centimeters long. They look kind of like albino beetle-y things with too many legs. They can increase fertilization success in red seaweed, grassalaria. They feed on the small algae that grows on the red seaweed and then the seaweed sperm can attach to their bodies and they carry the sperm just like a bumblebee carries pollen to female seaweeds, which helps them expose and fertilize exposed eggs. In return, they get a meal and they also get protection by hanging out on the seaweed. So based on that discovery, they're like, oh my God, what else is happening underwater? And so they looked further and they found more examples of seaweeds having sex, basically having their fertilization occur due to animals helping them out. And so they actually looked at animals that previously were blamed for seaweed problems, grazers, to see how they might hurt or help these individual seaweeds. And so they looked at urchins, which if you are familiar with the story of sea otters, especially in the San Francisco Bay Area, they always talk about how, okay, the sea otters were trapped and furred. Urchins exploded in population. They overate the kelp and then the kelp forests were kind of destroyed. Sea otters are coming back, they're controlling the urchins, the kelp forests are returning, it's really cool. So this is this whole idea that like urchins are hurting more than they're helping the seaweeds, these kelp, right? And so they wanted to look specifically at urchins because of that because that's the whole narrative we get, that urchins are hurting the kelp. Are they just the bad guys? Yeah. Right. And they found that gametophytes, so sperm or egg, are surviving through the urchin intestinal tracts. They were able to keep gametophytes for a few weeks that had been expressed through feces and noticed baby kelps growing from the feces of both of these urchins feces. And none of the gametophytes kept outside of the feces were fertilized. So being eaten by the animals actually helped them gain fertilization. They're not sure how. Their guess is that it has to do with proximity. So if the urchins are munching off this plant and munching off this plant, then they might have sperm and egg in their intestines. They meet and then they're able to fertilize it by the time they're pooped out. They're a little baby kelp. So where did you meet? Oh, we met in the intestine of the seaweeds. It was magical. Love at first sight. Yeah. The other guess is that it could have to do with some sort of chemical cue in the feces, but more research is needed. But so essentially they found repeated examples of animal mediated fertilization in the ocean, which means a couple things. First of all, seaweeds evolutionarily are a lot, lot, lot, lot, lot, lot, lot older than terrestrial plants. Right. So it's the age old question. Did this evolve multiple times? Or did animal mediated fertilization first show up underwater? Either way, very cool twist on how we think pollination started because the expectation was that it was very much a terrestrial process. And so that is not the case. So either terrestrial plants popped onto land already kind of with this mechanism at play or it's convergent. So my money is not convergent, but whatever. Yeah. I mean, perhaps I would guess convergent. Yeah. There's just too many factors. There's no bumblebees in the ocean. So how does this relationship permeate onto land through multiple different species, different kingdoms, like different, different everything? How does it how does it permeate through? Like it seems harder than to just stumble across this mutualistic relationship again. That seems much more likely to me. Right. If you're thinking the parsimony of it, then yeah. And I'm going to say that reproduction is probably a lot more opportunistic than it is deterministic in that sense. Yes. Absolutely. Yeah. So there you go. Next time you're looking at some kelp at the aquarium. Think about them using those urchins or those isopods to make baby kelp. Little babies pooped out. Urchin guts. But I think that the really interesting aspect here also is the change from urchins are bad. Okay. To realizing that urchins are part of the ecosystem and that urchins. Yes. When the sea otters, their predators went away. They went out of control. And that's what led to that decline of the forests, but they live in the forests and they are an integral part of the what happens there. So this just, I don't know. It gives more information about the nuance of those relationships. Yeah. Absolutely. And if urchins have been around for millions of years and kelps have been around for many, many millions of years, like many long times. Why? Yeah. Why would a deleterious relationship continue? It doesn't really make sense. It makes a lot more sense that they would evolve side by side and kind of find this mutualistic relationship. It's not always the case, but especially with the kind of, they've been buddies for millions of years. Yeah. Yeah. Kind of sort of buddies. I eat you. Maybe we can make this work for both of us. Okay. It is good. I'll just give you a little haircut. No big deal. I love it. I love it. There's better uses for that ravenous appetite of the urchin. Yeah. Yeah. So Blair, are you going to take your baby to the opera ever? To the opera? Not right away. To the opera. I think I should wait until he's at least a couple of months old, right? Baby. Yeah. Maybe once the baby can actually see things from a distance. Yeah. Yeah. Make sense of movements and everything. Anyway. Every 30 minutes. Yeah. That's a big one. Maybe not. Yeah. Have a tantrum every day. Okay. Researchers at the University of Toronto Scarborough have just published a study in which they took a bunch of babies to the opera. And they took the babies to the opera and looked at how the babies behaved. So where their attention was oriented, how long their attention was oriented there, how they, you know, where they were looking, how they were looking there. And what they saw from examining 120 babies from six to 14 months, so still pretty young. They had 61 of those babies watching the concert in person. 59 of them watched it on Zoom. So they watched a recorded version of the concert. And they tracked with heart monitors and they determined when the babies were looking at the stage or looking away and all this stuff. And they found that all the babies really liked the opera. They all paid attention to it. They all were like, oh, and kept having attentional bursts. However, the babies that watched the opera over Zoom were more likely to get distracted. They were at home. They're comfortable. So the babies were more likely to break their attention more quickly than the babies at the opera. So the babies that were actually at the opera were more likely to have their attention held by the activity on the stage. What they think is interesting about this is that it suggests that not just viewing that kind of enriching content. So teletubbies or whatever else on a screen, that there's something about the live performance. There's something around being other people in a social environment that led to the quality of the attention that the babies were able to give to the people on stage. That they were enjoying the sound and maybe the energy of other attendees. We don't know that per se, but the attention live and in concert was stronger. I love this. I think the first thing I thought about opera actually is that there's similarities between opera and what is called parent speech, which is when you have your elongated vowels and you have your high highs and your low lows in your voice. It's different from baby talk. Baby talk is like nonsensical language, right? But parent speech is when you kind of have that sing-songy voice and you go, oh, hello, how are you doing today? And that helps them develop language. And it's interesting. And opera's kind of like that. Elongated sounds, high highs, low lows. It could peak interest. And so I can kind of see that, although a lot of opera's not in English. So are these English-speaking babies? Not that they speak yet, but are they from English-speaking countries? And what language is opera in? This is McMaster University. It's Canada. Toronto, Canada. Oh, sure. Yeah. And it wasn't a full-length opera. This is like a baby version opera. Yes. I would imagine that would be tough. 12-minute show. We're not talking three hours at the opera for the babies. Yeah. So, and it didn't depend on what they could see whether or not the babies had had any previous concert or music engagement that all the babies, regardless, were engaged by it. But there's something about listening and experiencing with others that makes the difference. And so they ask the question, if a baby is frequently brought to these kinds of events, is it going to shape their foundation for engaging in music in the community later in childhood? So the question if they are going to do long-term study is, do babies that are taken to more of these things engage more with music generally? Does it shape lifetime habits of interacting and engaging? I'm also curious if they took babies to the movie theater to watch an opera. What about that? That's a great control. Yes, because you have your screen. But you also have the social interaction of the other people in the theater with you. Yeah. What part of it is what they're responding to? Is it the actual physical actors on the stage being in the same space with them? Or is it as you're talking about this kind of social experience where you're all in your inner room paying attention to a singular thing amongst others? They need to do more work. Yeah. It's very cool. I mean, I love it. It also maybe is a good reminder of where babies born during the pandemic maybe had some trouble. Yeah. And are continuing to have some trouble because if they only interacted with people besides their parents through FaceTime or through Zoom, is this related? Is this something where their attention span or their interest in people or any of these sorts of things could be impacted by the fact that they weren't in a social space? Which isn't surprising, but is still important for us to look at for sure. Yeah. And that, I mean, that's such, it's like kind of a natural experiment. We've got pandemic babies and post-pandemic babies. Yeah. That's going to be interesting research directions for sure. Oh, yeah. We're going to be studying that for another 20 years at least. Yeah. So Blair, take your baby to an opera or a live concert in a park. Sesame Street on ice. You got it. You got it. Yeah. Yeah. TeleTubbies live and in person. Oh boy. That would be wild. You can still watch TeleTubbies. I feel like that's the point, right? Yeah. I hope they're old hat. So we've gotten rid of our COVID segment of the show, but I wanted to bring a COVID story this week because I think it is actually very interesting and related to some questions that we had a lot during the pandemic. Specifically, so many people were asymptomatic and still are asymptomatic for COVID-19 catch the virus, no symptoms whatsoever, and then you test positive, right? So why is that? Why is it that some people are more likely to have symptoms than others? And this research study used a COVID-19 smartphone app that was developed by COVID-19 citizen science study. And they took advantage of genetic data stored in the U.S. bone marrow donor registry be the match. And they were able to collect DNA, have these DNA samples and to correlate COVID-19 experience with individuals in this and analyze genetics of about 30,000 people without having to go out and do cheek swabs or anything like that because all of the information was already there. They found that 1,428 unvaccinated individuals had a positive COVID-19 test. 136 reported no COVID symptoms whatsoever. And then they determined, excuse me, I'm going to sneeze, I think it's itchy nose. They found that there was a variant, a gene variant of a human leukocyte antigen or what's called an HLA gene in individuals with asymptomatic infection. The gene is HLA A-B, little star thing 15 colon 01, whatever. It's a little star thing. So this is a little mutation in the human leukocyte antigen, which is part of the immune system and encodes for particles that are T cells or that T cells recognize, sorry, that T cells recognize they are important in the immune response to pathogens. And they vary a lot, different HLA for different people. This particular variant, according to the researchers, their article on the conversation present in about 10% of European ancestry individuals. And if you had a variant, you are twice as likely as other people to be asymptomatic if you got infected. And two copies, if you had two copies, one on each of your chromosomes, eight times as likely to be asymptomatic. So it's not necessarily, you know, people like, you know, there's genes in nature, right, nature, nurture, everything. But there are genetic differences between individuals. And this is not only going to be important for COVID-19 and how we move forward. But understanding individual responses to infection in other viruses in the future. Yeah. So for example, if you could figure this out ahead of time, you could figure it out earlier in the pandemic, then you could have people with these predispositions test every week. Right. Yeah. No matter how you feel. Yeah. You feel great. But you might have, yeah, exactly. Yeah. It might be a carrier. And that's going to be a problem because like HIPAA and all this other stuff and you're not going to want to have to disclose to your workplace, your genetic makeup and all these sorts of things. But if you have this predisposition and your doctor says, you should really be testing weekly for COVID and, you know, you're a good person. You're going to do that. And then that can help prevent spread because that was, yeah, that was a huge issue with like the second, third, fourth, however many waves that we had of COVID. The first waves were based on just not knowing anything about the virus. But later on it continued. We got these bigger waves because people didn't know they were sick. Yeah. And so, yeah, it would be so nice to be able to identify, okay, I'm one of those people. I need to be testing myself regularly so I don't accidentally get people sick. Right. I might feel fine, but yeah. Gotta make sure. Yeah. It's interesting though these individuals, the HLA gene, their mutation did make them more effective at fighting off the virus. So that's really, it just keeps the viral particle number low. You get infected. The virus gets in. It starts to get in there. If you have memory cells that are like that because of your genome are like, I've seen this before attack. You know, you attack and they attack more effectively. They can, you know, tamp down the infection more quickly so you don't have those immune reactions. And you don't feel bad, but there still might be virus that you are releasing. Anyway, the other thing you could do, edit everybody's genes. What could go wrong? Just for the whole population. Just change everybody's genes so that we all have that predisposition and none of us will get sick again. Okay Blair. I see you. I'm just kidding. Never mind. Yeah. I mean, that's the question, right? This is diversity among humans. And that's part of the thing that allows people to survive well because there's a lot of genetic diversity, right? Some people do well. There's don't depending on what we're fighting off. So you can't just make everybody the same because then if something shows up that we're not ready for, what do we do then? When? When something shows up? When. Yes. Exactly. So if we just showed up on your radar, this is This Week in Science. Thank you so much for joining us for another episode of This Week in Science. We have a second half of the show coming up here very soon. And before we jump there, I would love to remind you that TWIS is listener supported. And one thing you can do is just tell other people about TWIS, spread the word, help share the science and get more people watching or listening to TWIS. And that'll help so much. The other is if you really, really enjoy TWIS, become a Patreon supporter. Head over to TWIS.org and click on the Patreon link. That'll take you to the Patreon page where you can choose your level of support. You know, anything helps. You really, really can't do this without you. Thank you for your support. All right. Coming on back for more This Week in Science. It's now time for that part of the show that everybody loves, full of animals. Blair's Animal Corner with Blair. What you got, Blair? I have bad news for Beth. When it comes to loud music festivals. Kiki, you like to go to music festivals? I do. Yeah. You think that's like it when you go to musical festivals? Nope. Probably not. But I never really thought about it. No. Thanks. And that's kind of why I wanted to bring this story tonight. I didn't really think about it either. University of West of England is presenting this week the first evidence of negative impacts of musical festivals or music festivals on bat activity, which, yeah, that makes sense. They found that even in the absence of additional anthropogenic factors commonly associated with festivals like lighting or habitat disturbance, loud music alone is enough to disturb several bat species. They declined. They observed declines in nightly back activity, bat activity along woodland edges of around 50%. It was a 47% in Nick Tallis epistica species. And then species that are usually super tolerant of humans also decreased their activity. This was P. Pippa's Strellis by 32% during music playback periods. So the way they did this, they looked at 10 sites in Southwest England and South Wales between August and September 2021. They found dark semi-natural landscapes along woodland edges adjacent to grasslands or pasture habitats. And so they resemble conditions that are usually the case for UK music festivals. And then over the course of two nights, the first was a quiet control night. But the second was a night with loud music playback. They had the loud music was at volumes reaching 100 decibels, which is comparable to noise levels at UK music festivals. They played five common songs, each representing a different music genre. I definitely want this playlist. I have no idea. And featuring different tempos and frequencies. They stitched all of them together to produce a 10 minute medley. And then they watched what the bats did. For two hours after sunrise, noise alternated between the music medley and then 10 minutes of ambient background noise. And they recorded about two meters from the speakers and then 20 meters and then 40 meters to study noise disturbance impacts on bats at these different ranges. And so they found that playing all of this music had an impact on these bats, the 47% or the 32% that I mentioned before. And so the hope is that, first of all, they can expand the experiment to include a range of different habits and locations. So there might be additional environmental elements at play so that they can find areas where bats are more tolerant. Maybe you can have your concerts there instead. But also they're hoping that this will impact policies related to noise levels for these festivals. Now, the thing that I wanted to throw out is, yeah, bats don't like loud noise. Lots of animals don't like loud noise, especially at night. But by them kind of isolating their variable of loud noise, I actually think they made the impact of the study worse. You set up a festival, you have lights, you have people, you have all these things. That could clear bats out of the area for a while. And so that could actually remove bats from the situation. They could go to a different area and have their habits not impacted during the festival because they cleared out. Whereas if you just are like, you're sneaking up on them and then bam, you turn on the music, of course that's going to impact their behavior. So this is more like researchers scaring bats away. Just scaring them like, ah, what's going on? I gotta run. Which, you know, the way these music festivals work, it takes a minimum a week to set up cycle and fencing, parking areas, booths, all this kind of stuff. They do sound checks, do all these things. Lights, yeah, everything. Warn wildlife that something's happening. Whereas that still is probably not ideal that you're clearing wildlife out of an area that is a wildlife area. Humans exist and we do things in nature. So you're not going to stop that. That's why I feel like they need to redo this study with all of the things. Like really they need to just study bats at a music festival. Right. To see how they behave. But I wonder also, you know, insects are going to be changed their behavior as well. The insects in the area are not going to want to be trampled in the ground. They're going to either stay away from the loud noises themselves or maybe the nocturnal ones be attracted to the lights. Yes. Perhaps there, yeah, and maybe there is something related to where the insects go. Do they go to the camping area? Do they go to the parking area? Do the bats move related to that? What are the specifics? I mean, what is the goal of this study? Tell people not to do music concerts because of the bats or what are we trying to do here? Right. No, that's a great question. And I think that's part of why they started doing the study where they were kind of checking at different distances. So you could figure out, okay, we know there's bats in this habitat. You have to be 40 meters away or all the speakers have to be 40 meters away from the tree line or something like that. That would be helpful. That would be super helpful information to have. But again, to your point, does it not matter if they then post up a bunch of lights that attract insects? And then the bats come to where the lights are anyway, then your 40 meters doesn't matter. So I feel like this is one of those situations where they tried to decouple variables. But the variable is music concert. It is not just sound. Yeah. The variable is presence of a festival. No presence of a festival. Yes, we know that sound impacts other sonar using animals in the water. So dolphins, porphuses, whales are impacted by loud sounds underwater. And so this kind of follows on the heels of how animals who use these senses for their existence in an environment could be impacted. I mean, I run away from really loud sounds myself sometimes. Yeah. So I don't know. Go to your concert is my point. Go to your concert. If you see a bat, enjoy the bat. Yeah. Unless you think bats are scary, then you might avert your eyes. Would you? You might, especially if you were a fruit fly. So my other story for tonight is all about the what's going on in our brains when we avert our eyes from a scarier disturbing image. This is something that appears to be conserved all the way from fruit flies. And this University of Tokyo study found the specific cluster of neurons that is responsible for this behavior. These neurons release a chemical called tachycinin, which appears to control the flies movement to avoid facing a potential threat. And they do think that this is conserved. And this is why we do this as well. I will avert our eyes from something scarier disturbing. It's a single cluster of about 20 to 30 neurons, and it regulates vision when in a state of fear. The way they figured this out, I actually really like this experiment design. So they use puffs of air to stimulate a physical threat and found that the flies walking speed increased after being puffed at. So this is the first step. They're training flies on how to behave around a threat, basically. So they need to make sure that when they're testing imagery that it is associated with a threat. Because you don't know what's going on in a fly's brain and what is scary to them. So you have to you have to couple it with some sort of stimulus to indicate that threat. And so they would choose the puff free route if offered. That proved that proved that indeed the puff of air was a threat to them, and that they preferred to avoid it. So then they placed a small black object roughly the size of a spider 60 degrees to the right or to the left of a fly. And on its own, the object didn't change their behavior. But when placed following puffs of air, the flies avoided looking at the object and moved so that it was positioned behind them. They didn't want to see it. And so if I don't look at it, it's not there. Exactly. Yes. So then they suspected this neuron situation. They mutated flies where they altered the activity of certain neurons. They could hone in on what neurons are responsible for this thing. And so when they mutated flies, they kept their visual and motor functions. They would still avoid the air puffs, but they did not respond in the same fearful manner to visually avoid the object. So basically they still didn't like the air puffs, but they didn't care about the object at all. So because they associated it with this very specific group of neurons, they were able to figure out this is what's causing it. So next they want to figure out how these neurons fit into the broader circuitry of the brain. They know it's in this visual area of the brain, but they don't know kind of how it fits in. And so they want to see from where the neurons are receiving inputs and to where they are transmitting them to regulate their visual escape from objects perceived as dangerous. And so they want to be able to draw a complete circuit diagram of how fear regulates vision, which, aside from just being really interesting and helping us inform how animals behave in certain situations. If it is something indeed that has been conserved into humans, this could help with the treatment of psychiatric disorders stemming from exaggerated fear, like anxiety or phobias. And so there is potentially an application to this in the end that could help with therapy in humans. So this is fascinating because there are a number of therapies that involve stimuli that you kind of go, how does that even work? EMDR is, I think it's EMDR, EMDR is a therapy where it's eye movement. De-synthesization and reprocessing therapy. I did not know that. I googled it. Yes, thank you. That's what it is. But you revisit stressful experiences from the past and there are eye movements that are involved in going back and thinking about them different ways. And there's been a lot of success for people in using this EMDR therapy to help them overcome traumatic past experiences and reduce anxiety and depression. I find that fascinating, just number one on its own, but then to now be able to say, huh, there are these potential circuits involved in a fear response for the eyes, for vision and what's happening in the brain that maybe there is a much deeper link that explains it in some way. But fruit flies. What? They, yeah, they avert their eyes from something scary. And someone in the chat room, Potato Dust, wants to know, could it also be a physical response given eyesight is a significant anatomical feature for the flies alternative to optical. So that's a great question. The way they kind of selected out for that was the secondary part where they had the mutation where they didn't have this neuronal response. And they acted differently. They didn't reorient their body away from a puff of air like they would if it was purely physical. They were specifically walking in a different way where they didn't mind if they could see the object. So really good question. And this study design was very specific to try to make sure that this is what was going on. It's fascinating. I am fascinating, but I guess it would be reorienting the body into enable escape to enable flying away. But I mean, what good is the I guess that I mean, in humans avert your eyes cover your eyes we watch a scary movie cover our eyes but that is it like object impermanence. If I can't see it doesn't exist. That's absolutely what I think. I think it's it's a desire to to not know. Cover my head with my blankets at night when it's dark and the scary sounds come from the closet. Yes, absolutely. That's I mean, whenever we're talking about animal intelligence, we always associate animal intelligence like a three year old human or a five year old human. That's when those impulses are still extremely strong. If I don't see it, it's not real. So for that to kind of originate in fruit flies would not be surprising at all. Yeah, but to your point, like evolutionarily, why? Because if a threat is there, it's there. It's going to eat you regardless of whether you really should. So is there something with like stress hormones where if you don't see it, then you don't get your stress hormones elevated and then I don't know. That's yeah, I wasn't even thinking about that. Why would why? Why would they do this? Evolutionarily, there has to be a reason. Yeah, I mean, there's fight flight or freeze, right? We used to talk all just about fight or flight, but freeze is also a reaction for many animals. The deer caught in the headlights or a rabbit or, you know, so it is something that happens. But yeah. Yeah. So is avoiding the freeze response? Is that the idea? Is that like if you got overloaded with stress, would you freeze? And so avoiding the visual contact, does that allow you to escape? Right. Interesting. Interesting. I like it. I'm speculating. More study is needed. University of Tokyo, you listening? I want to know more about these. Very fluent in English based on our previous conversation that we had. And they could listen to this podcast and follow up with their fruit flight research. Thank you so much. I'm sure that they are listening to this podcast. Yeah. Oh, for sure. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. And then, yeah, I guess the next question would be cortisol levels, stress hormones, look at all the ways that those can be manipulated as well with the visual response versus just the puff of air. Yeah. How does that all change? Yep. I don't know. I'm going to follow right on with your animal corner with a study that was published a week ago in Science Advances. Researchers published their work looking at little tiny primate animals that they're like, they're tiny wild. No wild gray mouse lemurs. Oh. Tiny primate, I think Marmoset, but you're right. Mouse lemurs are teeny tiny. Tiny tiny mouse lemurs. And so they can live in a lab. They live about three years. They also have differences in individual fitness and body shape size, et cetera. Researchers were looking at the big question of how does cognitive performance influence fitness in the wild? So cognitive fitness being like, how well are you exploratory? Are you checking out novel things? Do you like that? Are you problem solver? What aspects do you remember things? You're learning in memory really great. How does that impact your ability to survive? Fitness, as we define it in natural selection and study of evolution, excuse me, is related also to individuals' ability to pass on genes to a next generation. Which then also survived. So it's like this heritability factor is fitness. But in this study, they really, they were trapping wild gray mouse lemurs. And so they couldn't track the reproductive ability and the reproductive success of these 198 animals that they were able to trap and put through various different cognitive tasks to see how their personalities turned out. So these, the researchers had these little gray mouse lemurs go through a number of different cognitive tasks. A puzzle box, which is problem solving. You find the food. A maze, which is spatial memory. Open field exploration, just a big open space kind of testing it out and seeing what's there. A cylinder task, which is related to inhibitory control. So how much can you, like the marshmallow test, can you not do something? String pulling, which is causal understanding of if you pull on the string, something else happens. Or then neophilia versus neophobia, which would be a novel object. The issue I see with this study is that they couldn't test all of the animals on all of the tests. And they kind of mixed and matched. And they were like, well, some of the animals were in this test and others were in that. And so we got this general idea of personalities of the animals that we were then able to link generally to their fitness. But instead of actually testing their fitness, they related it to body size. So if you're old and big, they were like, great, oh, you're super successful, which is weird. So a lot of the details of this study I have questions with and but they correlated it with all of these individuals and determined that exploratory nature is something that was related to fitness or becoming old and big. So those that were old and big were more likely to be exploratory as well. They didn't know which individuals were going to die or how many kids they had had. But they determined that if you're older, you're more likely to have had more kids. So then you're more fit because you're older. So there's so many assumptions to this study that they bring up. But they're more likely. Sorry, go ahead. The bottom line to their study is also kind of a well done bottom line, which is that there are cognitive determinants to fitness and survival. No, absolutely. But the exploratory nature one really gets me because of course you're going to be more exploratory if you're older because you've experienced more. And that's just that's we know that already with animals across the line. The longer you live, the more familiar you get with different scenarios and the more the more comfortable you get with new things. That's very normal. That's that's we already know that causal relationship. So it's that's not helpful. That's not helpful. Yeah, but yeah, that's if you if you can't test every mouse lemur on every study, why do you have so many? Yeah, they went I which I find I feel like they went out and did a bunch of they were doing different studies and then they lumped a whole bunch of things together for one study. So I'm wondering if this is like a post hoc kind of P hacking. I don't know. Now let's ask the question. I love that that. Yeah, you're right. That really seems like, oh, a bunch of my friends were studying on mouse lemurs and had these different experiments. I wonder if I can. I forgot to do a doctorate. Let me just. Can I borrow all your data? I'm sorry. I don't want to I don't want to insult the person that wrote this. That's me. But but no, I agree. I agree with you. It seems very strange that you would have. You're always trying to isolate variables. Why would you add so six different tests that that's wild. And especially if you're not having all the individuals doing all the tests, you're not really able to determine overall personality like this one individual. Or this group of this is going to act this way, have these personality types. This is the way that it works. And so, you know, they're lumping them together. I guess what they what they really want to get at is that, you know, it's not only being the older and exploratory, but there were other successful strategies. And so there are multiple ways to be successful. They couldn't really pin down a particular intelligence quotient to be able to say this is it about intelligence, which as we know, intelligence is really hard to nail down in the first place. And then there's a kind of intelligence. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So okay. Yeah. Yeah. Cognitive performance generally is heritable and could influence fitness. Yeah. Yeah. That sounds correct. Yep. Yeah. Anyway, it's one of those studies. I just thought it would be fun to bring it here. Yeah. I also just like picturing those mouse lemurs doing those experiments that is also very enjoyable for me. And I will think I will I will continue thinking about that for a few days. I think. So I appreciate that as well. Let's think about mouse lemurs now doing little tests. I love pulling a string. Yes. Oh my goodness. What are we doing? Researchers speaking of animals and other things. We do a lot of research that involves animal cells and it's always kind of a goal to remove animal cultures. Cultures and other influences from research that involves human cells. Researchers from the University of Michigan have published in the annals of clinical and translational neurology. Their work that gets rid of mouse matrices to support brain organoids. So what do I mean when I say mouse matrices? Well, when you have a bunch of cells, they kind of have to be supported by something. And so there's an extracellular matrix that often has like fiber like fibrinogen support collagen supports proteins and compounds in it that helps the cells grow into a structure. And is that like bleached out animal cells basically or sometimes yes sometimes no it depends on what they're doing. And so for what they're talking about with brain organoids and these mini brains, they hadn't been able to support all of the human cells that have been used in these human brain organoids with a human extracellular matrix. They haven't figured that out yet. And so they've been using a substance that has come from mouse sarcomas. So from cancerous tumors in mice, they were it's called matrice matri gel. And it, that's what's been used by everyone for these human mini brains, which we use to study disease and development of things in humans right we want to know what's happening but we're using these this animal tumor tissue. So how is that impacting the results might not be the the system that is the best system. So they created a system without any animal parts in it. And they are able to use it for the neurogenesis of brain organoids. It's very exciting. And they have developed it from something that is called fibronectin, which is a protein that supports stem cells in human tissues and supports them as they mature. So fibronectin and they've also added a polymer as well so it's not just animals but it's also a porous polymer that's a scaffold so that polymer could probably be 3d printed or or grown if it self organizes. But the thing about this study that I love the best is like they're they're working on this, they're trying to do it and then coven 19 hit, and nobody was able to go to the lab for like a month. And their cells just kept culturing for that month without them, and they did really well with this particular mix. And that's kind of like, Oh, hey, we couldn't come and help me but look at they grew really well. Gosh, I can't imagine setting up an experiment like that and then not being able to go in and just for a month it being shorting or science experiment and you're just like, either everything's dead, or it worked. Yep. Wow. This, this worked really well and they determined that the organoids developed like a subrebro spinal fluid, which is the normal stuff that flows around our brains and helps with getting nutrients around and also with removing waste products and so this is really great because that's good and it means it's developing normally. So yeah, leave this alone for a month in the lab. We've got a little tiny little brain system all human. No mouse. No mouse. Wow. And my final study for the night is a story about how researchers were looking at the internal clock clocks in our brains. So we know we have a an internal clock that is influenced by sunlight. It is influenced by our internal systems as well. Some people are genetically more morning larks. Some are more night creatures. But our brains work and then there's a trickle down effect in other organs throughout the body that also have clocks and so that main clock impacts all the other clocks and researchers were like, Okay, let's look at this, but we also want to know not just how that clock works but how we perceive time and what's going on in the cells and in the brain as we're perceiving time, whether it's longer or shorter. And of course, to study how humans perceive time, these researchers looked at mice. And in this particular study, they took what's a pretty cool use of optogenetics. But you think optogenetics, it's light and genetics where it's involved. But what they did is they use the optogenetics to influence an area of the brain deep in the striatum of the mice, and they increased or decreased the temperature of the brain. And so instead of turning on light and stimulating a gene and making neurons active, they heated up or cooled down that part of the brain. And they saw that when they heated it up or cooled it down, it changed the activity of molecules, not just the neurons, but like molecularly, the speed of reactions, chemical reactions within the neurons. And that changed the way that the neurons in that part of the brain were working. And so they trained these mice to click a little lever to basically tell the researchers whether or not time was faster or slower in their head, like whether the mice were perceiving it as faster or slower. And they were able to get the mice to start telling the researchers, you know, I have a hot brain, time sped up, I have a cold brain, time slowed down for me. It took me longer. It seemed like drinking that water took forever. You're not having a conversation with the mice. In this work, what they determined, and the really interesting part of this that they determined is that there is this structure in the mouse striatum where the perception of the time is changed, but it doesn't actually change the movement or the motor control of the mice to actually click that lever or do the work that they're doing. And so the question is, you know, is this part of the brain now independently dictating this just brain perception of time and there's another area of the brain that might actually change the speed of the behavior. And they think the cerebellum is responsible for changing the speed of the behavior that happens as well. So even though the mice were like, oh, time is speeding up, they didn't move faster. So the next question is, if they go into the cerebellum and heat it up or cool it down, will they be able to match this time perception with the speed of the actions of the mice? Yeah, anyway, yeah, our neurons are responsible for how we perceive time, right? It's all clicking along with the speed of those neural interactions and what goes on there. But then everything is a dance, right? Everything has to happen in concert. It has to happen in a coordinated way. And it's just interesting to see which parts of the brain might be responsible for these things. And if we find out how the cerebellum is involved, what specifically the striatum is doing, if this is how it is in humans as well, which is likely, can this help us with movement disorders and possible treatments for people who have these, not just time perception, but things related to muscular disorders and things that are, you know, shaking and palsies and other things that inhibit or impair action. Cool. Yeah. I mean, I want time to slow down. I can put an ice pack on my head, right? Yeah, so this is like, I find, I thought this was so weird, the cooling down or the heating up of the neurons and they had to be so specific in how much they did this. So this is inside the brain. It's not the surface of the brain, but, you know, I don't know, as things get hotter and our, as our climate gets hotter and people are boiling on the inside, what's that going to do? But anyway, yeah, we got to go faster towards our demise. But it's, you know, the specificity of this research, I think the technique is fascinating also using the optogenetics to very, very specifically alter the internal temperature of the brain so that different functions happen. And nobody's done that previously. So this could also be used for other research questions as well. So you just put an ice pad on your head, don't put a bag of peas on your forehead, don't put your head next to a heater. No, no, that's not what I'm saying. Sure, that's not what you're saying Kiki, I get it. No, I know. Okay, I have one, I have one question about this though. Okay, so how do they, I want a little more explanation of how they know how the mice are perceiving time. Is it at a certain point they were they were supposed to do something for a treat or something so it's like, once an hour you get a treat. And so it was a question of when they go to do that. Yeah, so they, they trained the mice to report whether the interval between two tones was shorter or longer than a second and a half. So two tones would be always at a second and a half or during the training, they were probably closer together or farther apart to train the mice to respond in a particular way. And they found that when they cooled the striatum, the mice were more likely to say an interval was short. When they warmed it, the mice were more likely to say that it's long. Oh, it was the opposite, so okay. So heating up the striatum, sped up the neurons in the striatum, accelerating the clock. So the judgment of the time was that it was longer than it was. Longer. Okay. So speeding up means speeding up time. No, no, no. The perception of time sped up. Therefore, time felt like it was taking longer. Yes. So it's like your, your quicksilver from the X-Men where everything's going slow around. Got it. Yes. I'm there. I've arrived. Okay. Yes. I get it. That's a very cool experiment design. Yes, it is. It's pretty creative. I like it. Yeah. And I mean, it is invasive in that, you know, in optogenetics, you often have to have the light going into the head of the animal. So this isn't free running, but they were really able to, I don't know, influence this control without having to do the genetic modification, having to change the genes. It just changed the speed of the, all the, how the neurons were acting, whether they went through the neurons. I mean, if you want to make a time omelette, you got to crack some mouse skulls, I guess, as the age old saying goes. As it goes. Oh, wow. I'm never going to look at omelettes the same again. Yeah. Timey-wimey. That's for sure. Do we have any more stories? No, that's all of it. We cracked all our mouse skulls. Okay. Oh my goodness. Thanks everybody for listening. I hope that we have challenged your heads and brought you new information today as well. And I hope that you enjoyed the show. Oh my gosh, it's time for some shout outs. Donna, thank you so much for your help on show notes and social media. Gord, R and Laura, thank you for being in the chat rooms and helping to keep things friendly. Identity four, thank you for recording the show. Rachel, thank you for editing the show. Everyone in the chat rooms, thank you for chatting and being here while we're doing the show. Love having you here so that we can see what you're saying while we're chatting ourselves. And of course, I do want to say thank you to our Patreon sponsors. 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Don't forget to put twists into the subject line so your email doesn't get spam filtered into a music festival where all the bats are running away and the music's too loud anyway, and we just can't hear it. Yeah, that's a surefire way to be ignored. And people are bird our eyes. Yeah, you can try to hit us up on Twitter. I saw someone tweeted at me today. My Twitter's broken. I couldn't get to it. But you can certainly try. That's at twist science at Dr. Kiki at Jackson Fly and at Blair's Menagerie. We do love your feedback. I would suggest sticking to that email stuff from before. If there's a topic you would like us to cover or address or suggestion for an interview, please let us know. And if you learned anything from the show, wait, what am I doing? Oh yeah, no, we'll be back here next week. We hope you'll join us again for more great science news. And if you've learned anything from the show tonight, remember, it's all in your head. I'm setting up 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 below the warming with a wave of my hand. And all this is coming your way. So everybody listen to what I say. I use the scientific and I'll broadcast my app. This week in science. This week in science. This week in science. I've got one disclaimer and it shouldn't be news. That's what I say may not represent your... It's the after show. Yet understand, you know? You may just yet understand. I've had Neil Shirley who was one of the people involved in writing that song and producing that song over on threads saying hi recently. He sent a fun picture of some wind chimes with a sign in front of them that said that the wind chimes were made out of discarded robot parts and that he would be used as a warning to other robots. Good. So I need to get those for world robot domination one day. I don't know. I don't know if you want to anger the robots Kiki. I kind of think you've got to befriend them at this point. It's true. I've always said I am a friend of the robots. I may be scared of them but I am not going to disrespect. It's a healthy fear and respect is what I have. Healthy. It's good to be a little fearful. I'm afraid of people too. What are we capable of? What's going on out there? We got to watch what we're doing. Who made the robots? People. There are some researchers at Carnegie Mellon who are creating robots for exploration purposes. So like they can be controlled remotely or they can kind of be like Mars rovers where it's kind of a mix of both where they got a little remote control, a little programming, or they can be completely autonomous. And I guess the thing about them is that they're like durable and able to really go explore. Like it could go into caves or places that have had earthquakes or, you know, I don't know, maybe they could even go out into space. But it was funny. I was like reading the story and it's like, oh, that's a big advancement. And I'm sure it's great for this particular use. But I'm like, I already have a Roomba. My Roomba goes and maps my space all the time. It's like, oh, you put a chair there? Okay. Great. We already have exploring. Remember this. We are exploring robots in our houses. How's it going this week? You good? Pretty good. Chugging along. How about you? Good. I'm tired. Yeah, tired, hot. Hot? It's warm. How's this heat wave going for everybody? Shush. Shush? Shush. It's okay. It's pretty hot. It's been in the 90s in San Jose where I work. It's been in the 70s where I live mostly except. There have been peaks once a week for the last several weeks where it's getting into the 90s. I don't love this. I don't have air conditioning. That's fine. I have breeze coming off the bay. I'm pretty comfy. Alaska says what heat wave? It's those drips coming off the ice on your porch. That's the heat wave. It's different everywhere. I was reading something recently. I smacked my face because it's one of those head desk situations. Really? Finally, climate scientists can't even believe how fast things are changing and what's going on. I'm like, are you kidding? Scientists have been talking about this for decades. They've been knowing. Other people haven't been talking about it. Arizona this week. It's been in the 110s. The low at night, which is the thing that really gets you, the low has been 95 to 100 depending where you're at in Arizona. That's the problem is if it's not dropping, then your body can't regulate. Your body can't recover while you're sleeping. You're just sitting there sweating out every drip of liquid in your body. All night. That's really dangerous. Not to mention if the grid goes down, then you're really screwed. Other places are. It's super hot. Death Valley has been experiencing some incredible heat recently. Apparently, there's extreme heat tourism. That's terrible. People are traveling to Death Valley to take pictures next to their digital thermometer. No, thank you. Currently in Death Valley right now. Guess what the temperature is? Too hot. 107. Oh my goodness. It was 10 o'clock at night. The high today was 118. On Friday and Saturday, the high is going to be 124. Y'all. It's amazing. I mean, it's Death Valley, but still. Death Valley needs. On Sunday temperatures in Furnace Creek reached 128 degrees. I never want to live anywhere named Furnace Creek. No. I'm sorry. Oh my gosh. Let's see. Midwinter and is it Pamela midwinter and I'm running my air conditioner to bring the temperature down to 26 degrees Celsius, 78 degrees Fahrenheit. Wow. That's an Eric nap. Meanwhile is the coldest summer in the last 15 years, which maybe because of how the jet stream works and how the heat is building up along the southwest right now. It's going to be that is pushing the colder air up. So keeping it cold up north. It's all a system. It is all a system. A beautiful, wonderful, complicated system. That we keep details inserting ourselves into. Well, I don't live in Arizona and I don't live in Death Valley. I'm choosing not to insert myself into those systems. Same. Yeah. I keep really thinking a lot recently about like just the conversations generally and how things are shifting. There's still people moving to Arizona. Yeah. Which I don't understand. Yeah. But there are more and more people. Yeah. But then there are people leaving Arizona and moving other places that are going to be more temperate. Well, and it just sucks because like, you know, California and off in Oregon covered in fires. So. Yeah. We had a little bit of snow today. It's just the beginning. Yeah. So, you know, there's no safe bastion from climate change. It's just the thing. You have to adapt, adapt, survive. It's what we must do. Yeah. In the torrential down force, there's been lots of rain. New England, Vermont, Virginia, like, yeah. Massive rain. Other what has just what's happening right now. The new normal. Yeah. Oh my goodness. You're moving to the desert where it's cooler. That doesn't make sense, but it does. I guess because of it'll be a dry heat. Right. The humid heat. You know, in the desert, it's colder at night. Usually the temperature differential, I think between day and night. That's usually wider. It's not death valley. If it's not that valley. Right. So that was an almost 20 degree difference even now. That's true. Yeah. But yeah, I think that can't be. Is that normal for this time of year? Is it getting a closer, a smaller differential? That's what's happening. Historical temperatures for death valley. Oh, yes, you can look them up instead of me just asking you questions. Blair, you know these answers. I can. Subway. Hmm. How do I read this? Yeah. Paul Disney also no pollen or less pollen in the desert. That's for sure. What am I looking at? I don't understand this. A different site. What is this? What's going on? Data is very hard to see. How about this? Once we all live in space. There's no pollen in space. That's for sure. It's a mystery. We'll never know. Somebody has this data. Oh, National Weather Service. How about this? There's more and more people in Antarctica. What, what, who? I'm looking at death valley temperatures in July. The record high max. Oh, the date got it. So today, for example, is the 19th. The record high was 128 in 2009. And that was so 128 the record low is 96 and the average the normal is 118 and 92. Okay. So that's, you know, that's a it's getting hotter, but the nighttime temperatures 20, what is that 26 degree difference? Yeah. But the record high of 128 and the record low. What do you think? What's a record low maximum and a record low minimum? Oh, I get it. I get it. So it's the hottest coldest it's ever been, but I was thinking of more like the average spread, whether it's like usually like 20 degrees different or whether it normally cools down more at night, but it sounds like it in 92 is the average. Yeah. Yeah. So okay. Yeah. So record low maximum. So the coolest high for the day is 96 and then the record low minimum. So the coolest cool for the day was 75. Okay. And the record high minimum was 102, which it's currently 107. So if it dips down more, um, it might not break a record, but it might break a record this year. That's really interesting. You know, go fit weather.gov had me figured out and let me tell you it was the just for fun. I'm going to tell you it was the one, two, three, five, six. It was the sixth result on Google was weather.gov. I've been having conversations with people recently about Google the Google browser not giving great results anymore. Like they have switched things around. It's not working the way it used to I mean, so I feel like a search engine has a responsibility to not just give me the information I want, but to give me the most accurate information. It's not supposed to be an echo chamber like social media, right? Like if I search death valley historic high, weather.gov should be the very first thing I get because it is the most accurate and unbiased information. Regardless of whether like my previous browsing history indicates I might enjoy that site. Yeah, we've got news, a bunch of news things, but not actually answering that question and then a bunch of things people also ask and then national parks service finally in the midst and then a whole bunch of video things and then some other results that are, you know, a mixed bag. Right. Yeah, but it's yeah. Yeah, Paul Disney, right? responsibility is to serve me ads. I understand that. It's back to this whole insurance conversation we were having before people need information just like they need health insurance like it is a public service, but it has been turned into a capitalistic nightmare. And so the bottom line. Got it. Yup. Yes, a VPN could help, I think, but I don't know. People use other browsers. I don't know. But wouldn't wouldn't a VPN you'd still get the content for that is paid, right? You'd still get the things that pay Google to be at the top of the site. Yeah, unless you have like ad blockers and you're, yeah, there's there's all sorts of things. Duck. Go. Isn't that the one? No ads. Firefox supposed to be open source and friendly. Does it even still exist? Good Lord. Yes, it does. I know. We have a browser. It's not a search engine, right? No. And Duck. Go is a browser. Oh, no. Yeah. It's not a search. But they have their own search engines. They do. Yeah, I think. Yeah, different search engines. It's all sorts of stuff. Google is not the only search engine. Everyone just putting it out there. I would rather die than use Bing. Duck Duck is a UI for Bing, according to Sunny Knox. There you go. Bing is terrible. I'm so sorry. I hope no one from Microsoft is listening or is upset about it. But Bing is the worst. It's so bad. It's like, it's even worse than what I'm complaining about Google doing. It just gives you nonsense. Well, now it's like, totally. It's like AI powered. Didn't they do that? But yeah. So is Google. Meshaves. Oh my goodness, Paul Disney. Oh last one. You know what works also? The library. Oh, yeah, that thing. Librarians are amazing. They know so much. They can help you so much. Libraries are fantastic. I love libraries. Seriously. The more things change, the more I really just want to but I enjoy doing things like this show. So, people and friends, you ready for bed Blair? I'm so ready. Are you ready for bed? I am so ready. Yes, say good night Kiki. Good night Kiki, say good night Blair. Good night Blair. Good night listeners, viewers, minions, friends, chatters, good night. Stay curious, stay safe, hopefully stay healthy. But stay lucky. We'll see you next week.