 everyone and welcome to another live podcast broadcast of this week in science. It's just me. Oh my goodness. We're going to have so much fun tonight. I have so much science to talk about and I'm glad that you are here. I'm sure I'm going to make mistakes. There'll be things that'll have to be edited out. And that stuff will be edited out for the podcast. You're here for all the live fun that's going on right now. That's going to be happening because I have science to talk about. And I do hope that you in the chat will be here for me in the way that Blair and Justin normally would be with comments and questions. And I hope that we can have a lot of fun talking about the science stories that I've brought for this evening. This is going to be fun. Hit those likes, hit those subscribes, hit the shares, make sure wherever you're watching right now, you're letting people know that this week in science is going live. Because that's happening right now. Oh, I guess I don't have to give myself a single screen. I'm already here. So we are starting in three to this. Twist this week in science episode number nine hundred forty three recorded on Wednesday, September 13th, two thousand twenty three. Twist with a twist. Hey, everyone, I'm Dr. Kiki and tonight on the show, we will fill your heads with atmosphere, morals and dirt. But first. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. Curveballs exist in baseball, life and in science. The excitement exists in the moment between certainty and uncertainty. What is going to happen next? How can I respond? How can I learn? Can I find comfort while I'm trying to be ready for anything that might come my way? Well, I can't answer these questions for you. You'll have to do that for yourself. But I can keep you entertained with scientific research that probably is the result of a few curveballs along the way. Here on This Week in Science, coming up next. Thank you very much, Aaron Lorke. Good. Good. Thanks, everyone. Welcome to this episode of This Week in Science. You know, I'm trying to do what Justin normally do, do's what he normally does, but he's not here tonight and Blair is still out on maternity leave. So I'm on my own for a little while tonight. I'm really glad, though, that I'm not really on my own. I'm here with you, the people in the chat room who are watching live, the people in the Discord who are also part of this whole community. And what's happening right now? I'm so glad you're here. Thank you for joining the show. Okay. As we get started, I want to give a huge shout out to OMSI, the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry here in Portland, Oregon, who are facilitating the first ever Oregon Science Festival this week. There's a whole bunch of events happening all around the greater Portland area. And hopefully it'll spread throughout the state in future years. It's amazing that it's even gotten started, you know, since the pandemic and everything. This is very exciting. And it's going to culminate in the festival at OMSI in Portland this weekend. I have some tickets to give away. So if you email me, Kirsten, at thisweekinscience.com, the first people to email, I'm going to give out the tickets. So you can do that. You can also find out more about what's happening with the Oregon Science Festival at omsi.edu. But aside from that, there's science all around us, and we have a science show ahead. I have brought stories to you about atmospheres, discoveries in space, recurring cancer, and a little idea about how that could be happening. Oh, poor robots. Our moral brains and a little bit of dirty talk. And at some point, possibly partway through the show, we'll see if it happens. We will hopefully be joined by Dr. Karen Bondar, who is a science writer, TV host, educator, biologist with a twist. She hopefully will join us at some point to talk a little bit about what she's up to and also talk about some of the stories that come after she appears on the show. But for now, it's me, you, and the science. So if you have not yet subscribed to this Week in Science, please take some time to subscribe wherever you are watching or listening. Know that we live stream live every Wednesday at 8 p.m. Pacific Time-ish. And that's on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitch. You can find us by looking for this Week in Science. Sometimes we're twist science, like on Twitch or Instagram, some of those places. You can find show notes, another information about the show, and some links to subscribing if you head over to our website twist.org. Okay, that's the busyness time of the show. So let's get into the science. You guys ready? Y'all ready for some science? I'm going to start with a little bit of atmosphere. I want to talk about the atmosphere of an exoplanet in space. This exoplanet is called K218B, and it was originally discovered as an exoplanet with the Kepler mission. It was looked at a while ago by the Hubble Space Telescope, and Hubble said, hey, looks like there's some helium and some nitrogen, some hydrogen. Some really neat stuff in the atmosphere of that planet. It's in what looks to be a habitable zone around its kind of dim star. It's not around a really, really bright star. It's orbital time is about 33 days. So it's going around, it's very close to the star, going around the star pretty quickly, about a month for this planet to go all the way around. And it's also about 2.6 times the radius of the Earth and over 8 times as massive as our planet. So it's a super Earth-ish. We don't think it's rocky, but it's also not a Neptunian gas planet, not a gas giant. So what's happening with K218B? Well, J-WIST, the James Webb Space Telescope, took a closer look when this exoplanet transited its star. In the transit, it was able to see the light from the star pass through the atmosphere of this planet. And in taking a close look, because James Webb has great resolution, good cameras, it's got some really good infrared stuff going, it can really take a good look at what's happening there. And oh my gosh, what did it find? Similar stuff to what Hubble had previously seen. However, it also confirmed the presence of carbon dioxide and methane. And this is very, very exciting, because in noticing these things, carbon dioxide and methane, where would those come from? This is looking more and more like the kind of planet that's in the habitable zone that could have a very, very gaseous atmosphere, but possibly a watery surface. So maybe the surface of this planet is covered in liquid water. And one of the things that the researchers are excited about in this is a signature of a particular substance called dimethyl sulfide. Dimethyl sulfide is only produced by living organisms here on our planet. Phytoplankton produce dimethyl sulfide from the ocean from their activities. It's a metabolite that gets vaporized and it goes up in clouds over the ocean. And dimethyl sulfide is one of the compounds that seabirds use to home in on big schools of fish, because the schools of fish are in the places where the phytoplankton are, and the feeding is going on. And so dimethyl sulfide is intrinsically linked to life on Earth. It was a very slight signature, so they're not really sure about it. But the big question is, if there is dimethyl sulfide, of course, they're going back to look at it again, if there is dimethyl sulfide. What does that mean? Is this a planet that is what they call a Heisean world, where this planet is water-based, has great atmosphere, and possibly has life within an ocean on its surface? Or is it possibly that like the ideas of Venus, that there's life within its atmosphere? These are questions that we do not have the answers to at this point in time, but it's a very exciting discovery, very exciting observation from JWIST, based on Hubble, based on Kepler, based on all of these cameras, all of these pictures, all of these detectors looking out into space to try and figure out what is out around us. So K218 is about 120 light-years from Earth in the constellation Leo. So if you look up in the night sky at Leo, at any point, say, hey, hey, maybe there's life out there. And one of the exciting things that researchers who have published this work in the Astrophysical Journal Letters have said is that if this is one of these observations, there are many, many more of this particular class of somewhere between Earth and Neptunian size planets in our exoplanets directory than any other kind. So who knows? Maybe we will see life. Oh, I don't know. Well, maybe we won't see it because it's tiny and it's microbial in an ocean far, far away, like really far away that we don't even have a way to get to yet. Or maybe it's dolphins. I don't know. I have no idea. We don't know any of this stuff, but I think it's a very exciting discovery. And the better we get at increasing our resolution and being able to see closer and closer of what is making up these exoplanets, the more we will know. And Lauren Laura, you're asking, why don't we just send astronauts on the SLS to find out if there's life? Well, according to a report from NASA itself recently this last week, SLS is way too far above budget and it's not sustainable and it's too expensive. And oh my gosh, everybody knew this already, but people kept going because it was supporting a whole bunch of stuff. And I am concerned about the Artemis missions to the moon. If we aren't able to figure out how to continue to fund SLS or if we can figure out a way to work with other rocket manufacturing companies to be able to get rockets that can take us out of Earth orbit to the moon, to Mars, these other places, we need those things. And I'm quite sad that, you know, I'm happy that finally the word is out. SLS is too expensive. We knew it. We knew it all the time, but are we willing to spend the money? What will we do? I don't know the answers to these questions. And so long and thanks for all the fish. No fish, we're not going out to any fish planets anytime soon. We need to have a generation ship or something else. There's some space companies out there working on nuclear, ionic, drive spacecraft, but we're not there yet. So for the time being, we just use our telescopes. We'll look out there for life and see what's there and imagine what it could be. Just imagine, right? Moving on from these stories of space, let's look at our own brains. Researchers like to take a look at our brains and see how they can control them. Mind control. Well, no, actually, I mean, mind control. Yes, but no. Neuroscientists are very interested in the ability to create more precise scalpels in terms of how we can work on our brains as opposed to sledgehammers. And right now, when we talk about SSRIs and other drugs, they impact the entire brain. They're like sledgehammers. They're not scalpels. They don't have the precision that would really be preferred by people who are working on things related to mental health. How can we treat people who have issues in very particular areas of the brain? How can we help? What can we do? And, yeah, R&L, how do SSRIs work sarcasm? There is a little bit of that there. Well, this new study is just published in Nature Communications this last week, looking at low-intensity transcranial ultrasound stimulation. So ultrasound, which we know very well from its use in allowing us to visualize soft tissues inside the body. So we can see developing fetuses. We can see the heart beating. We can see amazing structures within the brain and the entire body, thanks to ultrasound. Ultrasound is very high-frequency sound, right? But it's when focused, it can bounce off things and give us an image, kind of like radar sonar, but we're using it to image our internal anatomy. And in this particular study, the researchers looked at different areas of the brain to see if they could influence the brain and behavior by using this ultrasound. It's been shown previously that ultrasound in mice can change the way that GABA is released and can change behavior in mice, but nobody's ever done it in people before. So, ta-da, they got people to volunteer for this study and they put them in an MRI machine and then used the ultrasound to stimulate different areas of the brain. There were shams that they used that was a similar kind of audio effect, and people who were in the study could not tell the difference, apparently, between the actual ultrasound or the sham. And in this study, they determined that when they used the transcranial ultrasound, they were able to actually influence GABA release in particular areas of the brain. So, they specifically were able to change GABA concentrations in the anterior cingulate cortex, which is in the posterior cingulate cortex, and these measurements were changed for about an hour after the ultrasound stimulation happened. The reason they say at least an hour is because that's when they stopped measuring. So, it's possible that there were effects that led to changes in the brain that were much longer lived, but they didn't study that and report on that in this particular study. So, in this, it was a first step to actually see whether or not they could induce changes in the brain through changes in GABA signaling and they say it worked. And it's pretty cool. They're looking at now not just the GABA system, but whether or not they could change the dopaminergic system. And so, if you can change the dopaminergic system, all of a sudden, maybe you're changing motivation, maybe you're changing addiction, maybe you're changing depression. There are a lot of aspects to what this could potentially do. But at this point in time, they found that different areas of the brain targeting impacted different systems differently. So, what this is concluding is really that the whole brain isn't the same. And when you target different areas, it might depend on the needs of that area or the condition of that part of the brain to begin with. So, if GABA is kind of low in that area, you hit it with the ultrasound and the pressure changes the neurons and the neurons go and they release a bunch of GABA. Maybe that's what happens. Or maybe they've already got something going on and they're already releasing GABA. So, if you stimulate it, it doesn't do very much. And so, these are questions that they don't know the answers to yet. And so, they're going to have to put more people in MRIs and hit them with transcranial ultrasound stimulation. It's going to have to happen. Would you get in an MRI? Would you do that to see whether or not it could impact your brain, your mental health, induce changes in your brain? I mean, I think it's the exciting aspect of this is that they did find that there were functional, connectional changes in the salience network, in the default mode network, in areas of the brain. And so, this is potentially really interesting, but I don't know yet. But then the question is, ultrasound? Do you want to go? How long is it going to last? Would you rather take magic mushrooms? I don't know. Another tool in the tool chest. Here we go. We've got so many things that we can use now. So many different possibilities. Would you, could you in an MRI? I don't know, Fada. I have no idea. Oh, some people, yeah, some people can't get in MRIs. You wouldn't necessarily have to get in the MRI for the ultrasound. It's just for the brain scanning, Kevin Unique. So, yeah, for this, this point in time, it would just be for study. Another topic we want to talk about in terms of study is cancer. Breast cancer very often recurs. Lots of cancers recur. You know that you go through cancer treatment and you go through chemotherapy and you think, done. Yay, I made it through. Got it. It's out. It's great. But very often, there are periods of time after which the cancer recurs. And so the question is, what causes this recurrence? How does the recurrence occur? Are there dormant cells that have just been allowed to stay dormant and something wakes them up all of a sudden or what's going on? What happens? Researchers just publishing in plus biology this last week looked at pretty standard chemotherapy drug and how it affects cancer cells and the cells around cancer cells. So they were looking not just at the cancer cells themselves, but all of the cells in a system, kind of like an ecosystem. That could be kind of, right? Cells all working together. They send signals back and forth. The cancer cells are not an island. They're not. They work with the other cells there. Yes. Right. Okay. Shubrew is saying 16 months into recovery gets scanned every three months. Right. Arnlar, your aunts came back. Right. So recurrence is a very big deal. A lot of people know people where this has happened. So they looked at a particular, a particular chemotherapy drug and a cell model and also a mouse model of what was happening. So dosataxyl was the drug that they used at physiologically relevant concentrations and they determined that even at very low doses, non-cancerous, what are known as stromal or body cells were injured even when cancer cells were not and that treatment induced cell cycle reentry in cancer cells. So that the chemotherapy, what this is saying is that the chemotherapy themselves allows a reawakening of dormant cancer cells. There are a couple of signaling factors that the researchers, researchers found to be incredibly important in this process, which is where they're going to be focusing a lot of their energy from here on out. They found that the molecules, they're signaling molecules, granulocyte colony stimulating factor and interleukin six get released by the injured stromal cells. And those act on the dormant cells, the dormant cancer cells to promote their growth. And this happened in the cell model in vitro and then also in the mouse model in vivo. And so they have targets now. They used antibodies to block these signaling molecules. And when those signaling molecules, the granulocyte colony stimulating factor and interleukin six were blocked, it inhibited cancer cells from waking up from their dormancy. It inhibited that reawakening. And so it leads to a possibility of creating chemotherapies that are more effective because they're hitting the cells. And even though they might be injuring the stromal cells, there can be other factors introduced during the treatment to make sure that only the cancerous cells are the ones that are being impacted. So does this mean that chemotherapy is a carcinogen? Not necessarily. No, because it's a carcinogen is something that mutates DNA to lead to a cancerous outcome or unmetered growth. The researchers here say that their paper highlights a deleterious effect of cancer chemotherapy release of stromal IL-6, interleukin-6, and GC-SF, which is the granulocyte colony stimulating factor, by taxing chemotherapy, that's the chemotherapy drug family, awakened breast cancer cells, a postulated mechanism for tumor relapse. Transient blockade of cytokine signaling during chemotherapy administration may prevent tumor recurrence. So this is, I think, absolutely fascinating because it's really starting to look at the system that cancer exists within. So not just the blood and the oxygen and the cancer cells themselves and the factors that keep them alive and keep them going, but now really digging into why, how they come back and why they come back. And I think this is a fascinating, a fascinating discovery that hopefully fingers crossed is going to lead to better chemotherapy and cancer treatments in the future. We'll see. I don't know. You can kill, if you kill all the cells, Arnold is asking if we kill all the cells around the cancer and starve it. Yeah, you can do that. But that's the problem is if you're doing the damage, it's damaging the ecosystem. And so there are these other immune system factors that are potentially promoting dormant cancer cells to become reactivated. And I don't know. There's some very interesting stuff going in there. We haven't gotten to the human studies yet. So maybe we will get there next based on this research. I don't know. Maybe we will. What do I want to talk about next? Oh, I have so many stories, y'all. It's great. But I don't know if I'm going to be able to do a whole 90 minute show. We'll see. We'll see what happens from here on out. Next study is from Rice University. Researchers at Rice University have just published in ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces. Their study, which is really exciting to me because what they're looking at is reducing the amount of waste from personal protective equipment, PPE. So during the pandemic especially, masks are getting thrown away, gloves are getting thrown away, temporary bunny suits thrown away. We've got garbage, garbage, garbage, garbage, garbage, tons of waste going into the waste stream. What could we do to mediate that a little bit, to ameliorate the waste that we are causing? These researchers at Rice really took a look at how the supply chain shortages implied that there's a great need for reusable PPE. How do you make PPE reusable? You take your gloves off, suddenly your sterile gloves are inside out and they're just in the garbage can. You're not going to be putting those back on again. So the researchers in this engineering lab have, instead of looking at latex gloves, they are trying to create textiles that could be used to sterilize while people are wearing the gloves or other pieces of other other types of PPE. So they have created gloves that can be worn right now. They are prototypes and of course this type of glove looks more like a glove that you might use for haptic feedback while you're gaming than it does something that you would wear for very delicate medical procedures. But hopefully in the future, the fabric can be minimized. The components that are involved can be miniaturized and then it could work. But the basic idea that they are doing here is creating a glove or a fabric in which it's comfortable for the user to wear and the interior side of this fabric doesn't get any hotter than body temperature. So it wouldn't burn a wearer. However, using electrical currents, the material on the outside heats up to 212 degrees Fahrenheit over 100 degrees Celsius, which is effective enough to kill 99.9% of viruses and very likely lots and lots of bacteria as well. So the dry heat that they're using, it tends to be reliable. It doesn't damage protective equipment as much as other decontamination methods. So they're really interested in how this could work with the mechanisms that potentially destroy viruses and other microbes and use high temperatures and heat to be able to kill them off. So if you're in your sterile gear at a medical facility as a doctor, a nurse or whatever, you would be able to wear the same gloves without taking them off in between patients. Simply heat them up and the heat would make everything sterile and you could move on to your next patient. Maybe. We're not there yet. These researchers are still developing all this stuff and hopefully it will continue to be funded by the National Science Foundation. But you can find this in its publication at ACS Applied Material Interfaces. And I see right now, there's somebody, I think I need to invite to the stage right now. Yeah, it's me. Hello. Hey, Kiki. How are you? So good. I am like beyond excited that I get to jump on with Dr. Kiki. Like you made my today, like yay. Sorry that I- You're making my whole day. This is just great. I mean, I've been here talking with my audience about the sciences, but now we have a wild Bondar sighting. It's wild Bondar, international habitat. A university classroom. Oh, it's fantastic. So all right, everybody, I want you all to give a big hello to our guest host tonight, Dr. Karen Bondar, who is joining us from- From the University of the Fraser Valley in Abbotsford, British Columbia, Canada. And so you have written science books. You have been on TV, doing science documentary TV show type things. You've been on the internet. You've been on a wrecking ball. And you're teaching science and science communication. So I mean, am I keeping up with you? What is- I feel like you are one of the hardest working women in science communication and science. Oh my goodness. Thank you. I am delighted that the world does seem to have heard the cry of, you know, science communication. I think I'm sure that you noticed this as well, but in Canada during the pandemic, it really for us became so clear that science communication needs a bigger platform. We just really do. And then, you know, in British Columbia, our health officer is actually a science communicator. Yeah, Dr. Bonnie Henry, she was actually able to really break down a lot of what was happening. And I think it made a difference for people in British Columbia because, hey, let's just take it right back to the scientific method. You know, we try and we get data. And if we have data that supports a hypothesis, terrific. If we have data that does not support a hypothesis, terrific. It is still science. And I think a lot of those things as we went through with different vaccines and as, you know, the science changed. And as scientists, we certainly are okay with that. But there was a real, you know, disconnect with the general public saying, wait a second, how come you're changing the science? So yeah, I've used it anyway as an opportunity to sell the alarm bells and get science communication into our university. Yeah, and I'm delighted to be doing it. That's fantastic. I saw you're doing some work with a Heron reserve. Is that what's happening there? So we live in, well, an area of British Columbia, just right on the border with the US actually. So the closest American city to where I would be is Bellingham. We are right in the Pacific Northwest. And we have a number of collaborative partners that are in the British Columbia area. And this Great Blue Heron nature reserve is one of them. It's a restored habitat. It's a 10 acre wetland habitat that used to be a military training base. Whoa. I know. And it has been rewilded by a community group that, and now we, as a university, we work in there. I had, oh, Kiki, you would have loved it. I had 30 swamps and bogs while tromping through the marsh. And what's so good about getting students into the field like that is it just really gives them a taste for how it's going to be. And I think if they're like me and they're like you, they love to just learn those things and getting a chance to learn them in really interesting spots like the Heron reserve is great. The Heron reserve has so many Herons, by the way. You can go through the breeding loop for most of the year. We do keep it pretty safe for them because it's one of the largest breeding colonies in North America. Super cool. So are you able to go bird watching? Is it open to the public? And yes. Yeah. And we, so it's interesting because we are in a part of the world that is very supernatural British Columbia. So who do we get out there? Well, we get hunters. We get fisher people, people who want to fish and hunt. And actually I noticed that we have a lot in common a lot of times with people who are out there observing wildlife and wanting to, well, sure, if they're hunting it for food, that's actually a pretty natural thing to do. So yeah, there will always be people in the Heron reserve. There will sometimes be people fishing, not directly in the reserve, but just outside, which is always a little annoying. But you get the bird watching. You're like, hey, you're taking the Heron's food. Come on. Totally. But you know what, they don't see it that way. And so it's also part of our, you know, what do we do? Our jobs as stewards of environmentalism and, you know, friendly faces across the reserve as well. We try to just, you know, make sure there's always somebody there who can talk about the cool wildlife so that those lessons are hopefully getting learned. Yeah. I mean, in terms of the outreach part of it, we understand, you know, and across the United States we have our, you know, our wildlife and national reserves where we have people who are there to talk about, you know, people who can talk about all these things and, you know, whatever. But I think like your point there about being able to connect with people who aren't just eco-tourists, who might be hunters, fisher people, who use the environment in different ways and being able to, you know, find common ground and find that place where you can agree that it's great to have this preserve because of the benefits. And how can we do that in other places? Right. Yeah. How can we use that as a model for moving forward through difficult times? I think, I think it's a great way to think about it. And certainly, yeah, you know, there are times where those are, you know, you feel frustrated. Absolutely. And certainly we've gone through a lot in the past several years and there's a lot of division. But I do, I have found that, you know, coming out of the ashes, if you will, kind of trying to get back to some semblance of what normal looks like. We gotta like each other. We gotta, you know, and if I show up with my students and there's always people there fishing, then we might as well talk to them and learn from them and also let them know what we are doing. And yeah, so the Heron Reserve is almost, it's very close to the university. So it works for a number of different classes. I know that my swamps and bogs students. Is your class called Swamps and Bogs? Oh, it is. Perfect. You know, we also have directed research that takes place there. And I'm not sure if you know this, but I am oddly another weird thing that I do is I'm on the school board here in my local little Canadian town. So it's an interesting position then to be actually having that small, small political role. But what it lets me do is it let me bring all elementary students into the reserve so that my university students could could hang out with them and talk to them and stuff. So yeah, I guess I'm just one of those people that loves to connect, you know, and I think that maybe, well, obviously that's what we're missing during the pandemic. Yeah, I mean, I feel, yeah, yes, we all are aware of the lack of connection and the way that impacted our society on so many levels. And I mean, we learned a lot of lessons about who we are as a culture and what's, you know, what's important to us as individuals and minorities. Yeah, I was listening to an NPR talk show this morning where they were discussing the financing of pre-K home care for child care, you know, education, you know, that and how there are some people here in the United States who make six dollars an hour and are educated with master's degrees and early educational learning certificates, but the money is not there. And yes, R&L, NPR is still around. Nobody's taken the funding away from NPR yet here in the U.S. But the host of the show made the statement that in during the pandemic, it because parents were unable to take their kids to childcare, they still had to work. It really brought that to the forefront of, you know, it put that in in our faces. And now that it's quote unquote over, the question is, you know, where are we going to go from here? And I think, you know, we don't want to have we put the mirror down now that the mirror is not reflecting on us anymore? Or are we going to continue to pick up the pieces of that mirror and to do the hard work and to try to look at ourselves to be able to understand ourselves and really communicate these big things that are important to society? I agree. And I hope, I mean, my hope is that we could continue to do it. Here's the question that I have for you. Turn it around. I love it. That's what this is about. Immediately, what came to mind me in Canada is the instance of pseudoscience and misinformation online. What's that like for you? I'm super curious because I know you're just in such a larger area. You see so many more people. I mean, it's it's the same, but bigger. We know that it's a huge problem. I mean, but I was really, really impressed. You know, this was kind of before the massive Twitter meltdown. But I was incredibly impressed with the Canadian scientists and public health officials and science communicators and the way that Canadians, I mean, honestly, there was an entire group that was from all across Canada coming together with hashtags and fighting misinformation and trying to do, you know, speak, speak facts to misinformation, try and to, you know, repair damage that was done. And I, I found it very inspiring. And I was like, I mean, I don't want to move to Canada, but I mean, I already moved to Portland from California. So it's only a little bit further north. No, I'm kidding. But so at the same time, yeah, it's a massive misinformation, disinformation environment. And that makes it just all the more ripe for things to go wrong for people who work within science communication and science to miss each other and not see each other and not be able to organize in a way that's useful and helpful. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah, I'm, I'm putting together a class for the general public for the couple of months from now, just so you know, we do a lot of sort of outreach and stuff. And it's just basically about how, how do you tell, how do you tell if you are a person and just a regular person if something is pseudoscience. And you know, I, as someone who's had a lot of scientific education and training, I feel, you know, confident when I look at an article or a skim where it came from or where it's published or anything like that. Like I think I have so many, I have this arsenal of tools that I use, you know, and because you were, you were trained as a scientist, you went through years and years of academic training, learning. And so yes, it's like, and it's just in your brain. It's just there. Yeah, it's just awesome. And I just, I would love to be able to kind of get it out in sort of point form in some pragmatic ways, even if people are just doing a search online, looking for, you know, symptoms that they're experiencing or something like that, you know, how can we arm people better? I, but I love thinking about how we can do better in that regard. So. Agreed. Yeah. How can we do better? Yeah, there's a, there's a lot that can be done better. There's a, I think it would, Carl, I'm blanking on his last name right now. He's at University of Washington and he and another researcher, it's based on statistics, but they wrote a book based on a course that they teach, which is the book is called calling bullshit. And the book is really, like, you know, this is how you use statistics and this is how people misuse statistics. And these are things that, that you can use. And it's a college course. And it's out there. And it's a book. So if you're going to be organizing your course, you need to find this book and talk to Carl. I think I do. I think I do. It sounds like a great, yeah, a required reading, absolutely. Yeah. Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West. Thank you, Aran Lore, my chat room. Thank you for bringing this to the forefront. Thank you. Yeah, I definitely want to check that out. I'm so excited because my university is actually given the semi green light. We have a working committee. We are trying to put in place a minor, an actual minor in SCICOM, which would be super exciting. Yeah, super exciting. There's only like a couple of places in Canada that offer it. One in Ontario, one at UBC for health and SCICOM. But I just, I want to see science communication being taught regularly everywhere. Oh, I'm in one of those. The lights went out. Here it goes. You've got some great, it's something shadow box. Yeah, you've got some great effects going on right now. That's great. Let me just try and fix that. Okay. You have to dance more, more moving around. I came back. Sorry about that. I am excited to possibly get that minor moving. And I'm excited that there's been feedback from the university that they want this. We really just want to be able to talk to more people in all fields, right? Medical fields, certainly dental fields, but environmental science is a big one as well. You know, anybody working in environmental science is just so much better off if they are able to talk to all the different folks they'll run into in that right, in that regard. Hi, and this is something. So I've been organizing a conference called Science Talk for several years with a nonprofit used to be called Science Talk. We have now organized as a professional member based organization called the Association of Science Communicators. And our focus is to be the hub for science communicators of all kinds. We're not just focusing on science writers. We're not just focusing on scientists who are communicating science. We want to bring everyone together. We want to make it work in a way so that the researchers who are studying science communication are talking to the people who are doing science communication. And the people who are doing science communication are talking to the communities they're communicating with. And then that all gets back to the researchers again. And so hopefully there's a circular knowledge economy that ends up making society better in the end. And we wrote an open letter a while ago for open science and just the idea that science is for everyone. And the UN has stated science as a basic human right. So yeah, and understanding that it's not just that science is being done, but there has to be communication pathways. There has to be a back and forth. The science is not done to you. Science is not just something that you learn in a classroom. Science is a process and it is and that you're a part of that process. And being a part of that process is your right. Oh, it's beautiful. Yeah. Everyone can be a science communicator. But you know what, it makes so much sense. I mean, it always has made a lot of sense to me in that regard. But it's funny to that even still in a system that where we start and say, well, where can we put courses in? There's always pushback. But is this a science course? And so that's where I definitely am still finding that. But I'm with you. I'm a really passionate, strong supporter of keeping these communications pieces in scientific curriculum. They have to be there. Otherwise, the scientists won't be there otherwise. I mean, I remember finishing graduate school and it was just a common statement or a common thought that like, oh, well, you know, or even undergrad, you know, well, I got my science degree. I didn't learn how to write. And I just remember, and I got into communicating science and I was like, oh, okay, I got a whole new thing. I got it. Okay, I'm going to work on these things. Oh, and it's funny now because I will get, you know, psychom fourth year just taught it a couple of months ago. And it's funny how reluctant science students are to try it. Because we do, we still teach that, you know, that they're very regimented and rigorous. And it to even have a science student give me their opinion on something. They're like, well, where should I cite from? And no, no, no, I just want your opinion. Tell me what you think. It's strange. It's something that I've noticed that they actually are reluctant to communicate even on that level. It's like science has been kind of linear, you know, like you, you learn it, you just learn it. Like you said, it happened around New York to linear instead of it being something that you're involved with. And that's evergreen and that we, you know, that, that it's a, you're part of a landscape in that way. I like the way you metaphor it that way. Thank you. Yeah. And I, and I, and what you're saying also as part of a landscape is that historically it's been a very regimented and controlled landscape that we has, has, has not brought other voices in. And so the diversity is lacking. There's, you know, you've written books about sex and you've written books about a book about pregnancy. It was this huge surprise to me to find out that, that it, like the whole idea of, like, of women's studying women, like it was not even considered like it was back in the 1950s when some doctor was like, Oh, this is weird and wrong. And he made up a whole story based on something that wasn't even true based on something he heard of from the 1800s. And yeah. And it, and it got passed down and it became just this accepted idea about women's health. And now people are like, I didn't know. And I just had an honor student finish and she did this beautiful podcast series on women's health, women's health related to vaccinations. And she looked at the moment of the vaccination. She actually was able to interview Catherine Clancy, who's an old colleague of mine. Awesome. We spoke with her on TWIS and her and her colleague, a year or two, a couple of years ago, because she had started looking at the effects of the COVID vaccine on menstrual cycles and was doing a survey. Exactly. And it was her lab that actually came up with a big finding that the vaccine had an impact on aspects of women's mental health. And so my student ran, she designed a year long project. She interviewed so many women about this issue. It's essentially it's a women's health is this unknown thing. Our immune system and our menstrual systems are the same. And are we, what are we doing when we put vaccines into them? And vaccine science has been really largely done without the consideration of women. Yes. What I find fascinating is that it's a vaccine. It's impacting your immune system. The immune system impacts stress and hormones and hormones then are involved in side effects. It's like, we weren't even considering that or it was too difficult to involve. I mean, you had to have like a whole other cohort to be able to do that. I don't know. It's weird. We have to giggle because what else can we do? But giggle? Really? Is that what's happening? But it is. It's true. And I think that because we know it now, we can approach both science communication, reproductive health, women's health. I almost feel like I approach it from a lens of skepticism because I know that they're not necessarily meant for the female body. It's interesting to kind of consider how that how your perspective shifts around it. There's so many factors always, but women's health is something that we could certainly spend a lot more time talking about and doing so much more time and like we need to be calling it women's health as opposed to treating it as a disease. Absolutely. Absolutely. There's and there's so many great women online that are spreading these long messages that are doing awesome, you know, TikToks and different channels. It's it's really wonderful to see. It's also kind of daunting. But I always like to, you know, just look at what how how women are responding. Yes, the angry responses a little bit. What are those responses? You know, who are those people who are really telling it like it is out there? I like them too. I like the sassy people, but I like it. I like it real. If you can do both and you can keep it balanced, it's good. You know, sassy is good, but you're going to push some people away. I don't know. Exactly. It's there's always, there's always. It's always, it's always something you can't make everybody happy. Aaron is bringing up a study that I actually had on one of my rundown lists and I don't think I did actually talk about it on the show because we ran out of time. But there was a scientific article a couple of weeks ago in which researchers came out and actually looked at the absorbency of tampons and pads for the first time and and brought to light that researchers had never actually used blood or menstrual blood in the studies of these things to determine how much they would absorb. And in fact, they just, you know, the ads where it's like, they poured the blue water on the absorbency. That's really what they did. And you know, I'm not surprised. Blast it. Right. And I feel like I'm glad to be woke. I don't know about in Portland, but we get a lot of, we get, we get a lot of hate for being woke, unfortunately. But I'm like, no, woke just means you woke up to the fact like we woke up that we suddenly realized that, you know, 80%, 90%, 95% of what we know about modern medicine has nothing to do with this, with me. And that's scary. Like that's, that's disconcerting for women. Although I'm part of a women's group. And we've really turned to our indigenous, our local indigenous sisters to, to ask them what are some remedies, what's working for you, what are herbal remedies, and other, other things that we can, that we can also empower ourselves with, because indigenous cultures are matriarchal. And there's been so much strength for women, specifically our local Stalo people have a lot of, of course, they've been here forever, they have a lot of elements and salves and things from fireweed, from our native plants that we use here. So we're pretty lucky in that way, in that way. I remember when I was just starting my graduate school cohort, and there was a woman in the group who was looking at, she wanted to study herbal remedies. And she wanted to look into the components of particular plants to see how and why they worked. And that's what she was really interested in. And unfortunately, I remember having a conversation with her where she was so angry because she felt she was pushed out of the physiology program because she wasn't following the usual path of inquiry. She wasn't looking at the usual molecules, drugs, compounds, things that were accepted. She wanted to be looking at, yeah, she wasn't, she wasn't following the path that her PI, her advisor at that point, or anyone else in the program, wanted to follow. And so she felt pushed out and she left, which was really unfortunate. And I'm going to say that I think that probably has happened a lot Yeah, I imagineably it has, but it is wonderful to even to have a term, you know, I said just a couple minutes ago, I do get a lot of hate for being woke, but isn't it great that we have a term for it now? Isn't it great that we can say, I actually think that the feminist movement is gaining, at least because we're able to talk about these things, the, you know, just the over-representation of that particular demographic in academia, in science. And we're really able to talk about it in a way that we weren't able to even a decade ago, I would say. Yeah, and it's still shifting. It's still shifting today, you know, it's like this very rocky ocean, not rocky ocean, I'm mixing that up. Yeah, you know, we are in an unstable position, but I think we're in a place that's good because they got to lean into that instability and continue to ask more questions. And I think that's just going to benefit science so much more. And I think it's going to benefit science communicators. I really do think we, you know, you and me have been in this business for forever, right? But it's really gained so much, even since I graduated my PhD back in like, oh, seven. I remember my supervisor being like, what are you, why would you do that? Why would you do a blog? What is that? What is that? Why are you doing that thing? Yeah, it feels like we never move. But I guess maybe when we have these conversations, we realize we have a little. What's what's some other things coming up for you? I know you said you have recently solidified that professional organization. I love that. Yeah, so we have a board meeting this weekend actually. So we'll be putting together hopefully a lot more pieces of our strategy and coming together as a group to really solidify some of these plans for the organization and what we're doing, which is great. But yeah, I'm still doing this week in science and I don't know. Yeah, my my priority generally, I'm in this place personally where I want to do things that certainly matter. You know, I want to connect with people more. I want to make sure that I'm helping build curiosity, that I'm helping to grow communities that I'm facilitating social development, you know, like, I really want to be doing things that matter. That's where I am right now. So I love that. And I think science communication lends itself to that. You know, it's it's a beautiful thing, Kiki. Ah, thank you. It is a beautiful thing. Speaking of beautiful things, the human mind is a beautiful thing. And kind of related to this, this conversation, there was a study that was just published in Nature Human Behavior, in which it's out of UC Santa Barbara, Renee Weber's lab. They looked at 64 individuals using surveys, interviews, and brain imaging on the wrongness of various behaviors. So they put them through in an MRI machine, and they subjected them to these kind of virtual experiences where they'd have to judge what people were doing, make moral judgments on what we're doing. Okay, and they can measure their their brain. Okay. So they looked at their brains to to see how the brains were kind of showing the the difference between these moral judgments, as opposed to the social norms and things that were were normal. And so this in their model that they used, they use what they called the moral foundations theory. And this is a framework for explaining the origins and variation in human moral reasoning. Wow. This theory predicts that humans possess a set of innate and universal moral foundations generally categorized into six categories, issues of care and harm, concerns of fairness and cheating, liberty versus oppression, matters of loyalty and betrayal, adherence to and subversion of authority and sanctity versus degradation. And so they were able to kind of break these two categories down into individual based stuff, care versus harm, fairness versus cheating, this is how individuals are being treated or what's happening there versus social binding factors, the binding ones are more authority and subversion, loyalty, betrayal, sanctity, degradation. And those are more group level moral traits. Oh, interesting. And yeah, so they looked into this and they found that pretty much across the board, there's there are areas of the brain for everyone that get involved in in any of these moralistic judgments. But that's where the differences arise. And they said they found that there's there's no one moral hotspot in your brain that's like, bang, bang, you're a jerk. There's nothing like that. But there are and but they did find that there are different patterns of neural activity, which after they went through and they scanned everybody's brains, they could then go back using an algorithmic learning model to determine kind of which people were having particular moral judgments or were thinking particular moralistic thoughts in one situation or another. They were able to determine whether people were more liberal or progressive versus conservative, for example. And they they were able to say that particular reasons of the brain activated distinctly for very specific types of moral judgments. So those individualists individualistic type judgments were a little bit different areas of the brain compared to the group, the group social dynamic stuff. Yeah. And they fire at the same time. Do they fire at the same time? They do. So it's like a network firing. They fire in in conjunction with each other. Yes. So what does it mean? What does it mean that you agree? Because for me, the first thing I'm like, I don't know what the categories, what was your thought? Yeah, I don't necessarily mean they're these are your human designed categories of moral judgment. I'm hoping and guessing they came from lots of philosophical study and debate to determine, you know, okay, these are the morals. But this is part of research that is coming from, you know, back in 2016, they got started on it to try and figure out kind of the underlying mechanisms that lead to moral judgments, how people make moral judgments. And potentially now, you know, this could this information could lead to more research into understanding why different people make different kinds of judgments. And what I'm thinking of in terms of our conversation related to science communication, not that I need to read everybody's minds. But this is again, just I think data that underscores the differences between different people. And that not everybody processes information in the same way. And that because of that, we need to be aware of these differences when we try to communicate. And when we try to work with people when we politically try to reach across the aisle. Or if we're talking about climate change, you know, how or if we're being woke, you know, how what is how is that being perceived by somebody else in a particular way? And how is that leading to their their judgments about character? It is such a complicated puzzle. And I think it is a fascinating. It's fascinating that they actually have some neurological data that correlates in this way. That's that's pretty astounding in and of itself. I often talk to my students about their lived experience, right, like their lived experience that they even bring into a classroom on a particular day kind of remind me of that when you were saying that, you know, like how somebody understands a lesson is really dependent on where that person is what they've experienced that day. It's dependent on so many things that have nothing to do with pedagogy or the material necessarily, you know, that's a really that's super interesting and compelling the fact that they were able to show moral activity like in an electrical sense. That's wild. That's real. Yeah. And so it's, you know, in a sense, you know, some of the hypotheses of how we process stuff is like, Yeah, there are parts of the brain that are involved in moral processing. But different people have different areas active at different times. And it's, but it's also, you know, within different types of people and different psychologies, maybe, and different, you know, certain lived experiences versus others. Maybe there are predictions that can be made about how the brain is working. And maybe it can help us cooperate better. Let's hope. It's not really bad. Okay, but wait, okay, so here I'm going to throw a wrench in it. You do it. I like wrenches. Where do you put AI on there? Where do we put AI in that in that study? Can I really don't know, which is why I asked, but I wonder about it. Well, at this point in time, I don't think we have AI that is capable of making true moral judgments. It's just going to regurgitate moralistic statements from scientists, historical figures, philosophers. You know, at this point, I don't think we're going to, we have AI that's going to be able to do that. But I do have a story that could lead to AI that might be able to be better at making those kinds of judgments. We're going to talk about it. I'm going to take one second to take a quick break and let you turn your lights on. This is This Week in Science. Thank you so much for joining us for this episode. I am so happy that you're here. If you're enjoying the show, please let people know that they should be enjoying TWIS also. Share the show with other people. That's what community's about, right, everybody? Let's help each other out with TWIS. And also, if you like the show, help support us in our ongoing efforts by heading over to twiscott.org and clicking on our Patreon link. You can become a supporter at any amount that you are able to afford to help the show keep going, $10 and more per month. And we will thank you by name at the end of the show. And now, I'm going to come right back to the show. We're going to talk about right now this AI story that you have helped me helped us put up to the plate, right? I need to learn more about AI because I just think it's so other. It's something that I'm really... Yeah, so right now AI, artificial intelligence, that's just a fancy name that everybody keeps throwing around. But it's machine learning. Right now, it is machine learning. And we have different kinds of machine learning. But really, these are algorithms that are running based on large data sets and different types of machine learning processes. In this particular study that was just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by researchers out of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies and also with IBM's Research Lab and others, they're talking about sometimes AI breaks down because sometimes AI learns something in one data set, but then it takes another data set and learns something else and it forgets what it learned previously. We also have issues with these artificial intelligent... They aren't intelligent yet, really. I'm going to keep saying that, everybody. They're not intelligent yet. They hallucinate. They give wrong answers. If you go and say, hey, chat GPT, give me a study that'll tell me about the ecology of the evolution of bats, viruses in bats. And there might be some good resources and sources in there, but there's also going to be fake ones. Because that GPT is going to be like, oh, I think this is going to be a great study, but it's not real. It just fits in the moment. Like that, because I can tell when students hand me in a chat GPT, you know, you're like, probably good. It doesn't sound right. Yeah. Yeah. So there's this hallucination aspect. There's also the breakdown of AI algorithms in particular types of situations. What do they call them? They call it collapse. They say mode collapse is when you're training an artificial neural network on something, you train it on something else, it forgets the first thing it was trained on, and then figuring out why mode collapse does or doesn't happen in natural systems is what this study is saying. We may learn how to make it not happen in AI. What's happening with this study, which I was thinking would be interesting to talk with you about is we have ecologists coming together with computer scientists at IBM saying that if we can figure out ecology and resilient ecological systems a little bit better, maybe we can design better artificial intelligence networks. And so maybe if we understand some of the ways that ecosystems break down, then potentially we can develop artificial networks that don't break down, that we can use feedback loops in proper ways. Maybe there are redundant pathways, different decision-making frameworks that could be used. But the idea is that making it more flexible, which right now AI is not flexible, making it more flexible would lead to a more general intelligence, which is the end goal. It was really interesting when you said it forgets the thing that it learned before when it gets a new piece of information. That's something that really sticks out for me as being a very flaw of machine learning. Because the human brain, I don't think we could say that about the human brain. How could we ever possibly know when one piece of knowledge is split up into various components and used for other things? That's an interesting thought. And we do have these feedback loops and redundant pathways in our brains where information can be used in multiple cases, where one of the wonderful aspects of human creativity is the fact that we are not linear thinkers. We have this ability to focus on one thing and find another thing and put them together in a way that was never expected before. But we have a flexible system. There are flaws to our flexible system. Obviously, there are mental health issues. There are places where we have cognitive decline and disease that affect our biology. But what is happening in ecosystems that we understand about how can we create better ecology? And this is like what they really want to get to, I guess, is that ecology and artificial intelligence have been working kind of in similar directions, yet independently, figuring out complexity, looking at how systems work. How do these systems play together? When do they break down? When do they work? What happens? Is there a way that ecology could influence artificial intelligence and could artificial intelligence then come back to help us understand ecology? Really interesting concept. I mean, certainly, mathematical modeling has always been an incredibly important theoretical tool for what populations might do or could do. So I think in that regard, it would be a valuable tool. But I wonder what happens if AI or if this kind of work falls to nefarious purposes, because isn't that kind of the end game of the world these days? Right. But what if radio had been used for nefarious purposes? What if the printing press had been used for nefarious purposes? Oh, Bondar, you're so naive sometimes. So true. I want to believe in humanity. I really do. I do too. I try and have the optimism that is brought to me by conversations with people like you, by the people who are in the audience tonight, people who have lots of thoughts and creativity and curiosity. And there's good things happening in the world, darn it, not all bad capitalism. And I love how you said this sort of human nature of creativity. I really love these sort of creative smash ups. It's one of my favorite things before is when you see just ridiculousness in a way. I remember taking part in one where it was a perfume, it was a perfume house in New York, and they wanted one scientist, one artist, to come together with a perfumer and to create a fragrance that had a story with the biologist or whatever science it was, mine was biology, of course. It was life-changing. And I remember at the time thinking, this is a waste of money. Why did they send me all these fragrance things to try and stuff? And I didn't get it yet. And I'm so grateful that I got to take part in something like that because now that I'm a little bit older and I'm like, oh, see how I got to do that? And I wonder, I think about AI and I think AI can't be that. Humans, our creativity and our spontaneity and our wackiness is the magic. That's where we find out what we're really capable of. So I struggle with replacing that with machines. Yeah. And I mean, so Hank Green is one of the big YouTubers out there, the Green Brothers, Complexly, and all of their video series that they do. But Hank Green just put out a video basically saying, what are we going to do about YouTube and AI? Because the way it's working, you can go and get AI to give you, you get chat GPT to give you some ideas about a topic. And then you go, oh, great. Write me a script in the style of this person. Then you have a script. And then there are companies currently that will use AI to put video to the script that you've written. And then you just upload it to YouTube. And suddenly you have a video that was, you picked an idea and maybe you added it, maybe you didn't, but it's all going to be created by AI at some point. And so getting back to your point from earlier in the conversation, this is the point where we really need to dive into and dig into authenticity, building relationships with people and also really working with people to help them understand, and not just them, like the ripple effects of being able to help other people understand, it's all our responsibilities to figure out, like to tune your BS detector, right? We don't work on that. We ever, we got to get some humility, we got to really just get over ourselves in a way. And I think, I don't know, I think women are just inherently driven towards that. I find that anyway. I feel it should have been women. Women should have been in charge. There's a reason we're not good at it. It's a completely different conversation. And so anyway, I love this ecosystem AI research and the idea that the ecologists and computer science machine learning researchers are starting to try and bridge those disciplinary gaps, right? Make it a little bit more. Yeah, you brought up math and geometry. So I do want to talk about carnivorous plants. I love carnivorous plants. Carnivorous plants are so cool. So these researchers, again, a story out of proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers at University of Oxford's Botanic Garden and Mathematical Institute. How many times do you, this is again, interdisciplinary. We have botanists and mathematicians coming together to study picture plants. Love it. Now they need a science communicator, you see. They do need a communicator. Maybe they need you to come and talk about their picture plants. I don't know. Share the picture. News. Anyway. Perfect world. We'd have psychome students. Look it. There he is. Right there. Oh, I love it. That's the Nepenthes. I love Nepenthes. Yes. So these researchers have been studying Nepenthes, which is a genus of picture plants. And there are a number of different kinds, different species. And they come in different shapes and different sizes. And they have their flatter on the top. And some of them are more tubular. And some of them have like spiny teeth on the inside. And the researchers are like, why are they so different? What's doing that? And so, of course, they talk to mathematicians to say, let's look at the shape and see what shape has to do with it. And so the mathematicians looked at the different shapes. And they were able to determine a number of these three-dimensional geometries of the picture plants. And so the width, the flaring, the orientation, how prey slide in at different points in the plant and the stability of the plants. And they found that these differences in geometry actually had cost-benefit ratios. So that sometimes growing to a certain size or being flatter was more costly, but it allowed the picture plant, that particular species of Nepenthe, to maybe get more walking stick insect type prey. Or maybe if they were in even more nitrogen-poor environments, that their ability to capture particular types of prey because of the spines inside that they wouldn't normally be able to capture because the prey are more mobile, maybe that allowed them to survive a little bit more. And so these researchers say that studying these green predators in the wild can be difficult, but they are really enjoying using math as a way to study their differences. And they hypothesize, they even compare these differences in the way that the picture plants are built. It's like bird's beaks. They're shaped specifically to feed on different kinds of nuts, seeds, insects, or whatever. And so they've adapted their form to their function. Love it. And you even get some very specific relationships with some picture plants where you'll have a bat pollinator, for example, that only goes with the picture plant. So interesting. Oh, look at them pretty. And they're beautiful. And he might just go, oh, what a pretty plant. But now you can imagine that this particular plant, it became what it is because of very specific constraints in its ecosystem, the prey that were available, and that it adapted specifically to be efficient in that space. And maybe someday we will build bigger, better, stronger Nepenthes. No, I'm kidding. The nature of that theoretical work is super interesting. I like seeing math. But see, math will want it to be perfect, though. And biology won't want it to be perfect. So where will we be? How will we go? Yeah, I think that's a really, I mean, I love that there's the mushiness of biology and nature, right? The messiness of the mess versus the precision of math and physics. But somewhere it all comes together. Yeah, it is. Especially if you have the capabilities for those models that can be trained and kind of can act in a way that is a little more lifelike. At least, as you said, as a theoretical exercise, it can give you possibilities for the future, which is really cool. Like if we go to a foreign planet and there are ants on it, and we want to get rid of the ants, then we can build structures based on picture plant geometry that make the ants slide off. Listen, I'm not leaving earth. I'm not leaving. I'm not leaving. It's good here. But yes, theoretically, okay. Theoretically. What do you know about dirt? Oh, well, I know that dirt is, you know, amazing. I mean, soil. Soil. Yeah. The source of life. It could also be the source of no life, in which case it could mean a lot for who can live there. Yeah, soil is astoundingly interesting. Have you ever thought about earthworms and soil? Yeah. But do you know about that? So earthworms are a fun dissection. Have you done the dissection? Yes. As a biologist and physiologist, absolutely. It's probably my happiest thing thinking about. I mean, I've had four kids, right? And when they were little, we used to go out every time it was raining and go night crawler catching. So we have night crawlers here, which are massive, massive earthworms, and they get huge. And yeah, so I feel like we are quite lucky with the night crawlers we have. Do you have night crawlers in Portland? You probably do. And we have, yes, we have all sorts of earthworms. And when it rains, the earthworms come to the surface and they're like, ah, I can't. We don't like it. We don't like it. We don't like it. It's so sad. Stay in the ground. Maybe you won't drown. No, I don't know what's happening. But there is a study right now, and this is something that was really surprising to me actually, is that there are invasive earthworms. Just like all sorts of other invasive species, there are invasive earthworms, and they are invading Canada's boreal forests. This research out of the University of Alberta published in Soil studies how these invasive worms are shifting the soil composition and what's happening. That's wild. Yeah. So earthworms are really important for creating soil, being part of eating the stuff and then pooping it out. And then that's part of what the soil is. And it's part of the functional ecosystem of the soil, the microbes that are there are results of earthworm activity. There's also different fungi, and then that changes the plants that can live there, and it affects the entirety of the system. The microbes especially can impact the way that carbon dioxide is released from the soil or the forest for into the atmosphere. Yeah, cool. So these are very interesting things to be looking at. And they determined from soil samples of a lot of forest sites that these invasive earthworms kind of had a mixed effect. The increased diversity of fungal species and microbial species. Okay. So diversity is good, right? Because diversity usually means that there's a little bit better ability to deal with stuff and maybe it'll be more resilient and like that's really awesome. Yeah. Big problem though. It did have a detrimental impact on the kinds of microbes that were there in that they had faster metabolisms. So these invasive species are leading to microbes that are chomping stuff up and decomposing stuff and then releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere more quickly. That's wild. Yeah. So it's interesting. So they're increasing the abundance of fungi capable of living in symbiosis with trees. We don't know whether that's good or bad for the trees yet, but that's something they need to look at. So it's a big question as to what's happening with the these invasive worms, but it reduced the amount of carbon stored in the forest floor by up to 94% in some spaces. Holy smokes. 94%. Yeah. That's huge. Yeah. That's quite alarming. I mean, I wonder how invasive, how successful is this thing so far? You mentioned it's just starting to invade the boreal forests or have they got... It's been invading slowly, but the fact that they're looking at it now is really because it's progressing. It's not, you know, it's starting to become as a situation of concern. Yeah. And, you know, invasive species in general, I think, in our changing world are really, I mean, we are in a place, especially in our regions, in our temperate regions, we are getting that much more warmth that a lot of tropical species can come and come and thrive in our ecosystems, if you will. Almost like thinking, you know, you were in California before. You came up sort of a little bit more North to Oregon. I'm in British Columbia. It's almost like those California temperatures are coming up the coast and invasive species are coming right along with them. An issue that I'm really perplexed by or that I'm horrified by but I like is when they bring disease. When the new worms come with new disease. Oh, that is... Yeah, because they have new microbes, new parasites, and then how do they... And how do... If those earthworms are eaten by moles and voles, moles and voles are eaten by the predators and... How does it work? Exactly, exactly. You know, are we looking at a whole new ecosystem, really, similar, but species could be different. And that's the big question that we still don't know. It's the speed of climate change that is concerning and the speed at which it might impact the success or the failure of different species in different areas and how that's going to change ecosystems that we rely upon. Yeah, it is already, right? I would say. There's, yeah, a lot of questions and I showed my students one infographic from today and it was from NOAA and it was an infographic of all the billion-dollar disasters in the US in just this past year, one year. And there were some like 74 billion-dollar disasters in last year alone. Yeah, there's a lot. Come on. Why can't you show off Canada? Why focus on the US? Come on. It's like you're like sitting above us. Exactly, I am for North. I mean North. Oh my God, it's so longitudist. Oh my goodness. So longitudist of me. I love that music. Oh, thank you so much. I think we have covered so many different areas of conversation and I just love that I got to hang out with you tonight. Oh my gosh. Me too. Thank you so much for just reaching out. What a delight. I was like all day. I'm like, I'm going to talk to Kiki later. When you said yes, I was like, Kiki! Yay! Thanks for having me, dude. You are a legend and I am such a fan and I love your work and I always will to the end of my life. So thanks, dude. Let's keep hanging. Let's keep hanging. I'm a fan girling right back at you. Totally. So where can people, before we sign off here, I mean other than, you know, maybe applying to your university, where can people find you? Do you have any more books on the way? Is there anything that you want to promote? Oh yeah, okay. I have actually I have a couple things. I have a documentary that's out now. It's on CBC Docs. Me and Neil deGrasse Tyson, no kidding, talking about human synthesis. I'm not even, I know and I'm actually shooting a new doc with that company next week. So I'm excited. A couple of docs coming out and if you have the science channel, I think outrageous acts of science continues to play and I love that that I get lots of cool notes from people all over the world. Oh, there I go one last time seeing outrageous. So but yeah, that's I guess that's about that's where you can find me. And on this show and right here, that's right with you. Yay. You're so welcome. I'm just so happy that you could join me tonight. This was great. What a fun conversation that went all over the place. Yeah, perfect. I love that. All right, everybody wanted. Thank you so much for being here for the show. Thank you for all of you in the chat rooms. Thank you for those of you in the discord. Fada, thank you so much for your help in making show notes and social media happen. Identity four, thank you for recording the show. Gord, our Lord, thank you for helping to make the chat rooms nice places to be. Rachel, thank you for editing the show and of course, I would be remiss if I didn't share the names of all of our Patreon sponsors. Thank you to Arthur Kepler, Craig Potts, Mary Gertz, Teresa Smith, Richard Badge, Bob Coles, Kent Northcote, Rick Loveman, George Chorus, Pierre Villazarbe, John Ratnuswamy, Carl Kornfeld, Chris Wozniak, Vegard Schuftad, Donacan Styles, a.k.a. Don Stilo, Ali Coffin, Reagan Shubru, Sarah Forfar, Don Mundes, P.I.G., Stephen Albaron, Daryl Meishak, Stu Paulik, Andrew Swanson, Fred S.104, Sky Luke, Paul Ronevich, Kevin Reardon, Noodles Jack, Brian Carrington, David E. Youngblood, John Clarence, Lam John, McKee, Greg Riley, Mark Kessonflow, Steve Leesman, a.k.a. 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Justin's going to be speaking with Brian Dunning of the Skeptoid Podcast about UFOs and other skeptical science. It might be a very conspiracy-filled show. I don't know. We'll have to wait for the science. Don't miss it. Let's see. We'll be back on Wednesday at 8 p.m. Pacific Time, broadcasting live from our YouTube, Facebook channels and Twitch. And you can find more information at twist.org slash live. If you want to listen to us as a podcast, look for this week in Science, wherever podcasts are found. If you like the show, again, share it with people. Your friends are going to like Twist, too. I promise. For more information on anything you've heard here, go to our website, twist.org, sign up for our newsletter. We might send one one day. Contact us directly. Kirsten at kirsten at thisweekinscience.com, Justin at twistminion, at gmail.com, Blair Baz at twist.org, and put twist in the subject line so your email doesn't get spam-filtered into an invasive earthworm who gets eaten by a mole and then eaten maybe by, I don't know, a bobcat who then poops it out for, I don't know, on a leaf that a deer eats. We're never going to get that email. Put up a twist on that subject line. And you can find us on Twitter, maybe, TwistScience, Dr. Kiki Jackson's by Blair's Menagerie. We love your feedback. Let us know if there's a topic you want us to cover, address, an interview we should do, a haiku that came to you in the night. Let us know. We'll be back again next week with more great science news. And, of course, if you have learned anything from the show, remember, it's all in your head. This week in science, it's the end of the world. So 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 it'll cost you is a couple of gris coming your way. So everybody listen to what I say. I use the scientific method and I'll broadcast my opinion because it's this week in science. This week in science. This week in science, science, science, science. This week in science, this week in science. This week in science, science, science, science. I've got one disclaimer and it shouldn't be news. May not represent your views. We finished the show. I love your shadow dancing. I think that's going to be, it's like, seriously, it's like, I don't know, it's like old school MTV or something. I didn't know that the room would do that. That was a blast. Thanks for having me. Thank you again. I just loved it. I loved it. Ciao. Bye. Hope to talk to you again soon. Absolutely. Have a great night. What a special, special night. It was so cool to talk to Karen. She is honestly one of my favorite people. Surprising. I don't know if we've ever actually met in person. I think we've only ever, I don't have one. I don't know. Maybe we've only met on the TVs, on the internets before. But thank you everyone for joining for the conversation and the fun and for my solo intro time. And what a fun time. I ended up having just a blast, kind of weaving that conversation. She's fantastic. I hope you all enjoyed the show. Got my hair up in a bun now. Have a tired girl. Thank you, everyone. Thank you in the chat room. I appreciate you. Yes, John Hogan. Karen is really cool. She's like one of the coolest. Very much so. Arran Lore. This is the after show. What are you saying? Oh my goodness. Yeah, she's just a ball of good energy. And I, yeah, I appreciated that a lot. Great. What a fun surprise to have that happen tonight. I'm glad you all enjoyed her as well. Yeah, hard jars. Oh my gosh, the worms in the invasive worms in Canada. They're all getting burned up in the fires. Good and bad, maybe? Yeah. But what's some fun stories there to talk about? Yeah, go to, if you're in the boreal forests of Canada, don't worry about taking the invasive earthworms for your fishing bait. That would absolutely be fine. Arran Lore, missing one thing about the early twists. You're talking about the shin kicking, aren't you? That was when Justin was young. But I'm a little concerned about next week. I'm just going to say I put Brian Dunning and Justin into communication. I have yet to set them up for the putting their rundown together and making the stream yard work. I am off to North Carolina next week. I'm pretty excited about an event and a symposium, a colloquium. I don't know. It's a gathering of people to talk about the bridging of science or STEM and art. It's not really STEAM because we've had STEAM. So I don't know. It'll be very educational, informational for me personally to find out more about, you know, that space, that landscape. We'll find it. We'll find it out. Anyway, I'll come back and tell you all about it. I'm sure. Fada, enjoy Ahsoka. Yes. And then to bed. We'll try. Yeah, all of you. It's your job, Shubru. It's all of you to try and keep Justin in line. It's going to be very interesting. Yeah, so Brian Dunning, he has put a new documentary out, the UFO movie they don't want you to see. And I think Brian shared the movie link with Justin to make sure that Justin can watch it before their conversation. But it is available on Vimeo right now, if anybody wants to watch that ahead of a twist next week. And Aran Lore has posted in the Twitch chat, the Oh No podcast, an interview with Brian Dunning on rack. Oh, no. On rack. I don't know that one. I don't know a lot of things. I have so much to learn. Anyway, I am a tired one. And I am here with you. So I do hope that you all have a wonderful week. I don't know what I love on rack. Okay, I'll check out on rack. I'll make sure I do that. I will definitely check that out. Alien mummies. Harjars. You kidding out. I mean, it's probably just a mummy or something else. This is the conversation that you're going to hear Brian and Justin have next week. Not me. I know it's not aliens. I swear it's not aliens. Okay, I am going to say good night, Kiki, because I don't have anybody to say it to me. So good night, everyone. I hope you have a wonderful week and definitely come back for whatever, whatever comes for next week. That's going to be just entertaining. I bet you. And I hope you all stay safe, stay healthy, stay curious. And as Justin would support, stay lucky. I'll try to see you next week, but I don't think I'm going to have a really, really good one. I'm so scared of what Justin and Brian will come up with next week. Bye.