 So this is the weekly live broadcast of the TWIST podcast and we do hope that you are here for the science because it's about to get started. How's it going co-hosts? Good. Looking for whale gifts. Yeah, very good. As you do as the show starts, look for the whale gifts. If you have whale gifts, tweet them at Blair. No, no. I am good. OK. All right, everyone, let's are we ready? Are we ready? We're going to do this. You ready for science? Are you ready out there? OK, everyone out there, you know, if you're watching this, this is all the stuff. There's no editing for the video stream, but the podcast might be edited or the radio show will definitely be edited. But no matter how you enjoy all this twissiness, make sure you subscribe. Hit the notification notification buttons on whatever platform you're using right now so that you never miss an episode. Let's do this. Yeah, I yes, I do sound effects all the time. If you watch me regularly, you know, I am a veritable font of sound effects. OK, ready in three, two. This is twist this week in science episode number eight hundred eighty recorded on Wednesday, June 15th, twenty twenty two. How to see the galaxy? Hey, everyone, I'm Dr. Kiki. And tonight on the show, we will fill your head with brains, babies and want to be bats. But first. Disclamer, disclaimer, disclaimer. The following program is meant for audiences of all ages. However, from time to time, we will talk about things that might be for more mature audiences. Topics might include Frank talks about sex amongst invertebrates. Or we may make a few immature jokes while probing the subject of black holes. At other times, the subject is innocent, sounding as cats could veer off into a nearly but not quite profanity laced rant about brain parasites. There's really no telling. What we can promise is that the stories you are about to hear, however strange, however nerving they may be, no matter how bad the puns we make them about, make about them get, they are entirely sourced from actual science studies published in the past week or so and presented here for your infotainment on This Week in Science. Coming up next. There's only one place to go. And Stu Kiki and Blair. And a good science to you too, Justin, Blair and everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of This Week in Science. We're back again. Whoo, Justin has flown over the pond. We are all together to talk about the science of all sorts of things. Is it lobster day or mobster day today, Blair? As I was looking at the twist calendar and there's a little overlay of text. And I wasn't sure whether we should be celebrating lobsters or mobsters. Is lobster mobster day? So don't forget to pay your crustacean their protection money. OK. Oh, that's. That claws got a racket. OK. We've got science. We've got so many stories. What are we going to talk about this week? I have stories about. I wrote them down here. I have stories about baby brains and pieces of the solar system that we decided to pick up and look at and Gaia and Alan. But we don't want to talk about Alan. Justin, what did you bring? I've got a story, a very bad story about human echolocation. Astronomers found a new multi-planet system, and it's really close by, as well as some correlative nonsense from the field of psychology. Ooh, correlative nonsense. Yeah, just what we like to wait. Call science. OK, we'll talk about that one later. Blair, what is in the animal corner? Oh, it's my turn. I brought whales and seals. Apparently I'm still stuck in World Oceans Day over in the animal corner. And then before that, I have a really fun story about wigs. So I like wigs. I love wigs. Wigs are fantastic. You can be anyone with a new wig. All right. Well, we are going to jump into all these stories and more. And as we do want to remind you that if you have not yet subscribed to This Week in Science, we are available as a podcast. Look for This Week in Science. Anywhere you find your favorite podcasts. We are also broadcasting live weekly 8 p.m. Pacific Time on YouTube, Facebook and Twitch. You can find us as Twist Science on Twitch and Twitter and Instagram. And if all of this is just lots of names and bloobly blobs, just look for twist.org on your friendly neighborhood web browser. OK, subscribe, click the notification buttons and let's dive in to the science. Let's look at the universe, well, not the whole universe. Maybe just our galaxy with Gaia. Yes. Now, we might when you hear Gaia, you might think of. You know, Gaia, Earth, Mother, all that kind of stuff. What's she doing in space? What is she looking around for? What is she trying to find new people to live on her? Well, she's not out in the space. Gaia is a is the European Space Agency's mission to look at the Milky Way Galaxy. And there is a wonderful, wonderful telescope with two optical telescope instruments, three instruments upon it for collecting different wavelengths of light, one billion pixel camera. That's a camera with some pretty good resolution. We even have a TV that can. Pretty, pretty, pretty pixelated. But Gaia is looking to create the most accurate 3D map of our galaxy. And we've reported on Gaia over the years. The USA has released data a couple of times. But just this week on June 13th, they released their third data dump and a whole bunch of articles came out in a special edition of an astronomical journal. Gaia is an orbit around Lagrange point two. And from there, it's looking at almost two billion objects in our galaxy, position, velocity, brightness, temperature, composition, the type inside our galaxy, looking at stars, binary stars, exoplanets, interstellar medium. So the dust and gas that's in between stuff, solar system objects. It's also looking at stuff outside the solar system. So it's looking at the stars in our neighborhood. So looking at position and distance and the motion of those stars. Also looking that's the astrometry, astrometry, astrometry. Anyway, pronouncing that one great. Photometry is looking at the chemicals in stars, the dust, the color, the mass, the temperature, brightness changes, the age of the stars, giving us all sorts of information about stars within the galaxy. And then also there's spectroscopy, which is looking at chemical composition. And this is the stars. This is the dust in the interstellar medium. This is all the stuff to figure out what is where and how our galaxy has evolved. So this data release three, according to the SESA release, it includes a total of 1.8 billion Milky Way stars. 1.8 billion stars, which is. That's a drop in the bucket. It's just a lot of objects. And one of the really things really cool things about this is that by looking at the chemical composition of stars and the brightness of the stars, it's able to determine things like stellar interlopers where there might be stars in places that they didn't start out because they've been shot out because of gravitational forces from their original space in the galaxy. And because of their their chemical composition, we can know how old they are, what stage of evolution, stellar evolution they're in. And so we're going to get a really good idea of like what is where. So, hey, here's a young area of stars. But oh, there's this star that seems to be much more older stuff like hydrogen and helium and that kind of stuff doesn't have this. This star doesn't have a lot of heavy metals in it. So how did it get here? And we can start looking at the forces that might have led to where everything is in our interstellar neighborhood. According to Paul Disney in the chat room, a 4K screen has eight point two nine million pixels. So it's a lot more than 4K. Yeah, that means we don't have a TV or monitor that can see all the pixels, but it will zoom in really nicely. Yeah, other things that Guy is going to be looking at. Also, it captures stuff happening, not just inside our galaxy, but also outside the Milky Way Galaxy. So it's also taking a look at Quasar's supermassive black court holes that are a creating matter also at two point nine million additional galaxies around our own galaxy. So we have an idea of like where things are in the sky because you have to have points in the sky to reference the points in our sky. It's all it's all very complicated. Yeah, the Greeks figured out a long time ago. But another aspect of what they're looking at is they're also going to be looking at they're going to be they are looking at asteroids. So they're taking a look at near Earth asteroids, main belt asteroids, Jupiter Trojans, Mars crossers, centaurs, trans-Neptunian objects. It can also, Gaia has such good resolution that can see if an asteroid has a moon, which is in itself very, very cool. But the the the, you know, the coolest thing that they are are talking about is the fact that it's the largest 3D chemical map of our galaxy ever created, much, much higher resolution than we've ever taken a look at our galaxy before. And it really will allow us to understand our own galaxy, but also because of that, our our place in the universe, which is pretty exciting. But then what? Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, I was just going to say, it's getting even more exciting. That's what I was going to say. More exciting, more exciting. Getting even more exciting is astronomers have discovered a new multi-planet system and it's only 10 parsecs away, which how far is that? According to Star Trek, that's pretty close, I think, but it's still 33 light years away from the Earth. So it's too far away to vacation. You started tomorrow, you would end up there. The end of the universe. But it is too long. It is for communications. It is within the range of communication. If intelligent life be out there, we could send it a message. We'd have to wait 33 years until they got it. They'd need to decipher that message, figure out what the heck we were talking about. That could take a little while. Then they might take a year or more to kind of form the response. You know, come up with a reply that's something smart and funny, but not too like unserious, something that's friendly. It doesn't give off that come invade me vibe. And then they figure all that and then they send their response. And then it'd be another 33 years before we got that response. So it'd be 66 before they heard back from us. And that's even that's in a little bit more because then yeah, it'd be because then we got to wait and then respond and send it back again. So that it's 66 years between these. So by the time that we had like a start, a good start to a conversation, the we ourselves would probably have degenerated into a bunch of cybernetic gig workers trying not to wander too far from the factory floor, lest we fall off the edge of our flat earth. It's a really different point. But other than that, this does look like scientists have found more dead rocks in space because it's a rather small and cool dwarf star. It has at least two rocky earth sized planets, which is exciting, except that they are likely not habitable as their orbits are so close to the star. The temperatures will be too high to sustain liquid water anywhere on their surface. Nevertheless, scientists are excited about the system because it's so close. It does give the opportunity, the proximity and the brightness, give us the ability to study this system better than we've been able to study systems that are much, much further away. I'm watching a lot of Star Trek lately. And I feel like the main moral of that is don't send a message. It'll get misconstrued or used in some way and we'll get blame. No, I don't know. But it's no, that's pretty cool. I like the idea of being able to also like send. I don't know. That would be pretty wild. But I guess send a mission that would be many generations in the making and then be able to communicate with them. So even traveling at the speed of light, you'd be like, I'm going to dedicate my life for the next 33 years to just going there. Yeah, you turn into a salamander, so that'd be no good. But that's at the speed of light. We are capable of, I mean, our best shot or our moonshot maybe get up to around a spacecraft and go around 1% of this speed of light. So then it's 100 times 33 years is 3,300 years. Yeah, it's fine. You know, it's just like 500 generations. Nobody wants that. Nobody. By the time we get there. Just a couple of generations for sure. But I mean, we can send a message. It'll take 66 years to get it to get one back if they receive it and there is life and they translate it and decide to send a message back. Or in that period of time, it doesn't hurt. We've sent a message, but we also discover that there really is no possibility of anything other than microbial life. So what's the harm? It just goes. Microbes might figure it out. Maybe the microbes. I mean, those little microbial calculators. I did realize that if you took that 3,300 year trip, you had a colony ship that went out there to go visit or whatever. You'd still get the messages, right? That 33 year message. You could even be at some point in the middle and get them before they make it to their destination. 16 and a half years, yeah. Right. And then at some point, it's like, oh, hey, don't come after all. Yeah, things are real bad. And then you're like, yeah, you gotta turn the ship around. It's like, oh, colony, we're gonna go to a different plant. And then you come back to the earth and you're three, 4,000 years later. And nobody even knew you left. They really forgot about you at that point. Yeah, it's that idiocracy story, right? Frozen, preserved in time. And then nobody remembers that they happened to do that back when the experiment took place. I would hate to become one of those samples that's just lost in the back of the freezer. That's a heck of a way to go there. This is the side thing, but I have asked a number of people as I do. If they could time travel, they could travel anywhere in time, would they? And almost invariably, people picked the future. They'd be terrified of going into the past and messing something up and creating a paradox of ruining their lives and ruining the world. But going forward, nobody cares. That's their problem. You can change the future. It hasn't happened yet in our telling of the story, even though everything is happening all at the same moment, everywhere. Yeah, it's kind of interesting. It is. But I wanted to follow up with this also, we're not just looking outside of our solar system. We're also looking in our solar system. And Justin, as a past Hayabusa fan, you should be very excited about this story. We have an analysis of the samples from asteroid Rygyu. Oh, this is the second. This is Hayabusa 2. Hayabusa 2 has returned and been analyzed. And researchers are very excited about this. Of course, they have taken part of the sample and used that for their analysis while maintaining more sample to be studied in the future when we have better technology. This is the foresight of scientists knowing that our technology and our ability to analyze will get better. So they're saving it, kind of like the Apollo moon missions and the soil samples from the moon. And archeologists do that all the time. They'll dig up part of the site but leave the rest for future archeologists and better technology and that sort of thing. Yeah, and it's absolutely fantastic to save it for the future. But the current knowledge is that Rygyu is made up of the material that was floating around in space that condensed together to form the sun and the planets. Four and a half billion years ago when our solar system was formed, Rygyu was that dust that was there. A lot of it coalesced and clumped and turned into the sun and a little bit of it made a rock that we call Rygyu now that floats around in space but it's been floating around since the beginning of our solar system. And part of the data that is very interesting is that they have chemical evidence that the material in the sample while it's dry now did go through a period of something like a mud ball. So at some point in time, Rygyu heated and water that was probably ice within it from early in the solar system. The ice melted and made it a mud ball. And so that now it's dry. And so it's a desiccated mud ball. Asteroids, the desiccated mud balls of our solar system. So forgive my ignorance, but so does this buddy have its own orbit around the sun? Yes, yes it does. Yeah, it has its own orbit. But it's one of those, yeah, objects that goes around. I actually, I should, I am not recalling whether that this is a Mars asteroid or whether it's further out. I wanna say that it's a Mars asteroid. So does that mean it has an orbit around Mars or its orbit is impacted by Mars but it's still orbiting around the sun? It between, so there are Martian asteroids that are out past at the asteroid belt, out past Mars. It's why we, yeah, we seldom go out to the other planet. Giant wet muddy hail, I get it. Wet muddy hail, yes. Yeah, so, but early this, the mud ball stage was like 500,000 years into the formation of our solar system. So it was very early. And they think that the melting water, the mud ball was created due to the nuclear radiation. So the particles emitting nuclear radioactive particles emitting heat radiation that melted the water. Not that it came by the sun and melted at that point in time. Whoa, yeah. Yeah. But let's see. Rag, G, and C, Y, U. And let's see, this part can be edited out of the podcast, but I just wanna check really fast on the orbit of Ragyu. Give us a moment as Kiki adjusts her telescope. Yeah, where's the Earth? And where's Hayabusa, JAXA, and Anita, go to picture. There's all sorts of pictures. Let's see if I can get this one in here. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know if Testicle is asking if the solar system is like four and a half billion years old. Well, the Earth is about that old. I don't know how much before that the solar system. Not much before that, yeah. I guess it's about four billion, so it's a half a billion years before. Yeah. But there had to be another solar system before our solar system. Because there's- There it is, yes. The stuff that was created in a supernova that's here on Earth, supposedly like gold forms this way. So that had to- There had to be that- We might've been made up of the leftovers of a supernova. Very potential- Well, we would have to have been because of the proportions of heavy metals that are available in our solar system. So we are the product of earlier, the deaths of earlier stars. But yes, so this sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Ragyu is just inside of the Earth-Mars distance. So it's right in there. It's right in there. But it crosses over the Martian orbit. It crosses over Earth's orbit. It's right. Yeah, it's a little bit off kilter, but there it is. Neat. Somebody threw out the 13, I think 13 billion was the age of the whole universe? The whole universe, yes. But it's older than that now. They've, yeah, pushed it back. Keeps turning out to be a billion or two years older than we ever think it is. Or it's a Mobius strip and it's infinity. Well- Why not? Let's wave, let's wait for more data from Ragyu and yeah, we'll learn more about our solar system and maybe the universe as well from all of this. All right, we've done a lot of space news for the start of the show. Blair, is it time to put on a wig? It certainly is. I love wigs. Wigs are so fun, but also for many people, wigs are actually an important piece of health and mental care. You could have alopecia, you could be going through chemotherapy. There could be all sorts of reasons that a human might need to wear a wig to help feel more self-confident, more comfortable, what have you? And so aside from just me loving to wear wigs, there's a reason to want wigs to last a long time, look realistic and feel realistic. And this is something that science has not yet fully figured out. That's because real hair that is attached to a scalp grows out, has constant impact from the oils in your skin and just generally can bounce back from damage easier and all these things and that's why wigs, after just a couple of wearings, can already start to show signs of wear and tear, whether they're real or they're synthetic materials. Washing, you'd be exposure, repeated styling, they become dry and brittle. And so in the past, researchers have spray-coated a layer of graphene oxide on wigs, or other teams have immersed wig hairs in keratin haloysite nanocomposite and these have worked okay, but it is difficult to cover an entire hairpiece with these methods, may not be scalable, and it has been imperfect overall. And so a new piece of research wanted to look at a nanocomposite applied with a approach that is used for coating surfaces in other situations with an ultra-thin film. These films are known as Langmuir blog get technique applications. So these films, this particular LB technique, they think that it can actually improve coverage and increase durability. So first they had to come up with the actual nanocomposite, which was a blend of keratin and graphene oxide. And then the method is they actually dipped synthetic or human hairs into water in a special apparatus with movable side barriers. And after the nanocomposite was spread on the water surface with an atomizer, the barriers were moved inward to compress the film. And I love this, they liken it to the trash compactor in Star Wars. So the walls are coming in and that essentially binds the nanocomposite to the hair. This provides more complete, even coverage. And after hairs were treated with this approach, they sustained less UV damage, they were less prone to breakage, and they could hold more moisture than those that were immersed in a nanocomposite just kind of dunked in it. They also dissipated heat better, which is related to styling tools and generated less static electricity when they were rubbed with a rubber sheet, which is important for those of us with rubber sheets. Or if you wanna just be out in the world, static electricity happens all the time with hair and especially with wigs. Yeah, the synthetic materials get significantly more static. Yes, absolutely. So that's the long and short of it. Is that this is a new application technique and a new nanocomposite. It looks very encouraging based on these kind of small clumps of hair that they tried it on. So of course the next step is to apply to whole wigs to see if this is scalable and to see how they could make this accessible to the average person with a wig or if they could treat wigs with this before they are purchased by a consumer. Or if they could treat the fibers that are used by the wig makers before they even go into the wig making process. Yeah, especially since a lot of wigs are dyed or treated in other ways. This is totally something that you could just add an extra step to the process before you blend the wig kind of. That's, yeah, this is such a funny, weird niche piece of science. Yeah, there's a bit of it that's medical science. There's a bit of it that's social science. There's a bit of it that's chemistry. There's a bit of it that's engineering and all of it can work together to make our lives more fun and better, yeah. Better living through chemistry, engineering and just science generally. And yeah, and I'm sure this kind of a method and this kind of, we'll find other applications that creative minds will start to see things a little differently. Absolutely. Hey, Blair, I wanna talk about Alan for a second. Oh, Alan. Alan, do you remember all the things that Alan is responsible for? Yes, the destruction of animal society. Right, Alan, artificial light at night is pretty much responsible for a whole bunch of issues in birds, in just wildlife in general, insects, I think was the last story that you brought, Blair talking about the impacts of Alan. And now Alan has to go and affect plants, too. Of course, of course, because I mean, what is it that's important to plants? Light and water and microbes. Right, but light is very, very important to plants' life cycles. Plant circadian cycles are essential to when they decide to put out new leaf buds, when they decide to release their pollen, when they decide to turn golden colors in the fall and a new paper out of Iowa State University published in the journal PNAS Nexus has shown that Alan is responsible for more pollen. So allergies are potentially being made worse because of Alan. Additionally, the reasoning for this is that Alan is making spring start earlier for plants. So urban plants grow new leaf buds earlier when they're exposed to urban light. And the fall season, the golden, the dropping of the leaves and the changing of the colors starts later than it normally should because we are in our winter season adding all of our Alan to the environment. One more time, what does Alan stand for again? Artificial light at night. Artificial light at night, okay. Yeah, we did it. Alan affects me if somebody leaves the light on and I'm trying to go to bed, so I get it. Yeah, I mean, we've talked before, yeah, about when you have a cloudy night and how the city glow underneath the clouds makes it brighter. And how full moons, people act crazy. Crazy. Because the light balance isn't what your circadian rhythm wants. So in Denmark right now, somebody keeps leaving the sun on. And so almost midnight and then they like turn it off but then they just turn it, it comes back on at like four o'clock in the morning. Yeah. Ridiculous. So you're almost to the solstice. Yeah, the plants in Denmark are used to that. And they know when that's supposed to happen. So this is exactly it, right? Is that if you have artificial light on and you're in Denmark and it's, you know, March, the plants could go, oh, it's June. You release a bunch of pollen. Yep. Yeah, so Alan, it's impacting our allergies but even beyond that it's impacting the plants in our urban environments and again the ecosystem view it's affecting animals and insects and all sorts of things who rely on the plants that we're putting in our urban environments. So Alan, we should turn the light off on Alan a little bit more. Justin, when you're in the dark though you can do something like echolocate. Can we do that? Yeah, so this is research conducted by scientists at Durham University of UK, University of Birmingham UK, E. Hoven University of Technology, Netherlands and Placentia USA. They've worked together in this and discovered for the first time that human echolocators, the thing that apparently really, really does exist, have better acuity in localizing a target from 45 degrees off to the side as compared to straight ahead. Researchers tested localization abilities of nine blind adults. So it's not a really big group but then I don't know how many echolocators, proficient echolocators there are in the world. But they had nine of them in this study who use the skill on a daily basis and part of the utilization of the skill is making clicking noises and then reading the room with them. So they discovered, they did some tests and they discovered that the echolocation performance drastically improved at the 45 degree mark as participants can better locate targets based on echoing coming from those sideways directions. The research findings indicate that human echolocation and human regular spatial hearing might be governed by very, very different principles because regular hearing is most accurate straight ahead. It gets worse as a target moves further to the side in terms of determining where it is. Researchers point out that human echolocation may be relying on completely different acoustical cues that human spatial hearing, spatial hearing has more facets to it than previously thought. Researchers also characterized and analyzed that clicking behavior of the participants. They found that participants made quieter clicks when they receive stronger echo signals coming from sideways at 45 degree angles and make louder clicks then if they're trying to find something straight ahead. Full results of the study have been published in the journal Psychological Science. Lead author of the paper, DeLore Thaler of Durham University said, there's still a lot to discover about human echolocation and about human perceptual abilities more generally. Our findings show that there are facets of human spatial hearing that we did not know before. Also I thought was very interesting and researchers did too, they pointed it out. Better echolocalization off to the side as opposed to straight ahead is consistent with what they have seen in bats. Interesting. Bats echolocate better off at those angles than they do directly ahead. This is surprising because it's not the same system. That's even being used. Bats possess an anatomical and neural specializations that allow them to do echolocation in the way that they do at the level that they do, which humans do not have. Nonetheless. I would like them to do brain scans though and see what part of the brain in the bat and then what part of the brain in these humans are. He's getting activated. Yeah, that'd be cool. Yeah, so they're saying they think it has to do with a processing strategy. Must be part of this. That sensing has a similar strategy and the cues that it's looking for, even if the physical apparatus is like, I still don't know how. Have you ever tried to do this? There's probably some aspect of the 45 degrees off of center that is important because we have our ears located on the two sides of our head. So when something is straight ahead, it is equidistant from our ears. Whereas if it is off at an angle, one ear is going to be hearing the click at a slightly different time than the other. So it's going to be slightly offset. And this is how, yeah. And so this kind of like very, very slight, but the distance of our head is actually, that's a length of time, when you think about how long it takes for a sound wave to move a particular plate. And then additionally, because it's at an angle, it's coming in, the information that's reaching the two ears is going to be qualitatively different. Yeah, but why doesn't that work with sound then? Because it's different. Sound, we have a hard time. But wait, we're not, we're not. Telling that the sound is off to the side. But the echo coming back for these echo locators, it's easier to tell when it's off the side. So there's something, that's what's weird. That's why it's so strange. And that's apparently, do it too. But we don't know the answer. That is the reason I'm just positing physiological reasons. But yeah, we don't know the answer, but that's awesome. I completely agree. Because my first thing when I'm reading is this thing. Yeah, you just hear it. Because yeah, because you've got one ear on one side and one on the other, it's louder on this side. But then it's not, it's not a sound that's coming back. But a click is not necessarily the same as general sounds. It's the bounce off of it that they're registering. And that's the thing that I don't know that I could ever hear. If you practiced, you probably could. Don't even know, oh no, it's a sound. So I was looking, I was looking up, I remember hearing an episode of This American Life about this. And I looked and it was in 2015. And I found the episode, it's called Batman. And so Ira Glass actually interviews somebody who does this and it is fascinating. So if anyone listening wants to hear kind of a first person account of what this is like, it's a very interesting listen. Thank you for that. Yeah, I think I saw something on Stan Lee's Amazing Humans, whatever it was, Superhumans. Yeah, I think he also profiled the echolocators on there. And it's one of those things where you watch it and you're like, that's really cool. If it's true, like come on, Stan, don't pull my leg. And it's something that anyone can learn to do, but yeah, it's a skill, a learned skill for sure. It's super power. I hope you all are learning lots from this episode of This Week in Science. That's right, this is This Week in Science. Thank you so much for listening. If you're enjoying the show, please head over to twist.org and click on our Zazzle link. We have lots of goody goods for you and your friends that are very sciencey, very summery for those of you who are in the Northern Hemisphere. Got sweatshirts for those of you who are in your winter time. But head over, click on our Zazzle link over at twist.org and get yourself some Zazzle, Twissy merch. All right, it's time for a little tiny COVID update. Wait, wait, wait, wait. I need a sad trombone. All right, news this week for COVID. There was news out this last week. A study has come out potentially linking the hepatitis, what seems to be a hepatitis outbreak in young kids that we have thought was potentially linked to a Dinovirus infection, but seeing it as a virus, linked to a Dinovirus infection, but seems an Israeli study has linked it to previous COVID-19 infection. This needs to be confirmed. It is not a final word on this at all, but it is a concerning link that has been brought up. Here in the United States, the CDC does not believe that we have any unusual levels of childhood hepatitis at this current moment. So it's not something that is the same level of concern as it is in other countries that are looking at this potentially. There's a question. What happens if a pregnant woman is infected with COVID-19? What happens to the pregnancy? What happens to the child if the pregnancy goes to term? We know from previous studies that COVID-19 infection is a threat to pregnancies and that many pregnancies do not go to term if a woman is infected with COVID-19. A new study that's out in the JAMA Network's open journal has looked at the one-year neurodevelopmental outcomes of infants of mothers who tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 during pregnancy, and they have determined that there is a increased risk of neurodevelopmental outcomes that are different from normal in mothers who were infected. Is this based on baby behavior or is this based on the physical aspects of the brain? This is baby behavior. So this is neurodevelopmental diagnosis. And so this is babies going into mothers taking them in for a one-year well-checkup and checking for normal reflexes, for normal responses to particular stimuli. And doctors have a whole battery of tests they run to look for abnormalities in neurodevelopment. And in this particular study, they looked at this cohort of 7,722 infants delivered during a pandemic. 222 of the mothers had a positive SARS-CoV-2 test during pregnancy, made it to full term. And then it was determined that they were more likely to receive a neurodevelopmental diagnosis in the first 12 months after delivery. This is even after accounting for preterm delivery. This is an early study. So what the researchers say they wanna do is that, so this preliminary evidence suggests that there need to be follow-up studies to exclude confounding factors and to actually confirm this because this is correlation, not causation. It's just something that has been noticed and noted. Here's my concern with this study. There's a heck of a lot of social factors that impacted babies that were born during COVID. A lot. Yeah, so that is- The impact. That's part of the question. We have the other questions about what were, was there food insecurity? Who were these women that were infected with COVID? Are there socioeconomic differences? What are the factors that are involved here? We don't know. Where the baby's super isolated and not exposed to other humans in early in the first year. And therefore did that impact- But that's gonna also be all babies born during the pandemic are gonna be isolated. Yeah, all babies are- More than they normally would, yeah. But there's all sorts of weird things you could check to like, you need to make sure there's not a correlation between people who got infected by COVID and then were ultra careful with their baby and not out in the world. You know, like there's all sorts of things that you could look at. So what you're talking about, I think also comes- They need to look at all these things. I think what you're also maybe hinting at or leaning towards is diagnosis bias. The ADD will most often be diagnosed in children that are the youngest in their class. Compared to their peers, they may seem like they've got all this extra energy. Right, but this isn't kids that old. This is one year, this is within the first year of- Right, my point isn't about the age of the children. My point is about diagnostic bias. Knowing that the child- Mother had been infected. Then you're like, well, hey, why don't I, to be undetermined potential co-factor, as you know, there's like- I'm not sure about this. I think the Blair's point, I agree with that. The researchers did- So where are the currents on the show? We have to acknowledge, I've agreed with Blair. This is just a deal. A acknowledge, yes, acknowledgements made. The positivity during pregnancy was associated with greater rate of neurodevelopmental diagnoses in unadjusted models, as well as those adjusted for race, ethnicity, insurance status, offspring sex, maternal age, and preterm status. Third trimester infection was associated with effects of larger magnitude. So there's some interesting things to be checked in on there even further. And any illness in a mother during pregnancy is also something to be concerned about. Yeah. Depending on when it happens in the pregnancy too, yeah, yeah, big things to be looking at. And we're all wondering, what are the factors? We know the physical factors that potentially predispose somebody to be more likely to suffer from severe COVID-19, but what are the other factors? Are there genetic factors in play? And so some researchers from the University of Sheffield have now done an analysis along with researchers from Stanford University of genetic factors and found more than 1,000 genes that are linked to severe COVID-19. Particularly involved are those that affect the function of the natural killer, NK white blood cell. The genes that are involved in how that particular white blood cell responds seem to be very involved in predisposing people. But now we know that there are more than 1,000 genes that can be involved in leading to the development. So there are more specific factors that can be looked at than BMI or smoking status or those outwardly physical factors. So in the future, it could lead to treatments, it could lead to all sorts of other ways of looking at how we deal with COVID. And this is just looking at how severe COVID is. It's not looking at whether you got COVID or not, right? Right, it's just the severity. So those people who are more likely to have the bad outcomes. Yeah, there's been other studies looking at how likely you are to get COVID because I know there are some people who have been right next to people who got COVID, who live with people who got COVID and never get it. And so I know they're looking for genetic factors for that as well. There was, this was somewhat early on, it might've been during the lockdown. There was a story about an elderly woman, she was like in her 70s with leukemia, which means lots of white blood cells, but they're not necessarily working, not necessarily functioning. Who had COVID for 90 days, she was positive and still expressing reverse, but never herself went through the ill effects. So the relationship this thing has with our immune system is exceedingly complicated. We're not the host that it's used to and we're not used to hosting it and everybody's awkward at this point. Yeah, there's a wonderful article in the Atlantic right now talking about negative test results and how your negative test result doesn't really mean anything because we are at this point in the pandemic where we are no longer completely naive to the virus, even if you haven't been infected, you've probably been vaccinated depending on where you live. And so people have some amount of immune response and so there's a question for these with Omicron especially, why are we having all these negative tests? Negative tests, negative tests, even though I have symptoms, I know I was exposed, but I've had negative tests and maybe I don't get a positive test until the day that I start feeling better. What is up with that, right? What's happening if you're taking tests over four, five, seven, 10 days and they're negative even though you know, you know you're positive and then you finally get that positive test. There is, like you said, Justin, a very complex relationship between our immune system and this virus and so the question is, if the answer to a lot of that is if you have symptoms, you shouldn't just be relying on a negative test. If you have any kind of symptoms, you're sick in some sense, so you should be adjusting your behavior because you have symptoms of something. That's just common sense at this point, I think. Yeah, just tell all the employers that. Right, well, where are you, where are you, Mass? It's all fine. Right, but anyway, risk genes. Some of these genes might help us understand stuff later. I don't wanna talk about COVID anymore. Do you wanna talk about COVID anymore? Should we move on? No, no, yes, yes. You do, yes? No, yes, you gave me both options to say no more, yes. No more COVID, yes, move on. Moving on up. This is This Week in Science. Once again, thank you so much for joining us for this episode. Head over to twist.org and click on our Patreon link. If you enjoy this show so much that you enjoy it every single week, maybe help keep the show going. It's your support that does keep us going. We are listeners supported and we would appreciate your help. It would really do a lot to keep us going through these summer months, fall months, winter months, all the science months, all the science months. Twist.org, click on the Patreon link. Patrons at $10 and more a month. We'll get thanked by name at the end of the show. And now let's come back to that wonderful, wonderful part of the show that's full of animals. And this week, I guess is again, full of the ocean, whales, tails and all the things. It's Blair's Animal Corner. With Blair. By a pet, little pet, no pet animal. If you want to hear about animals, she's your girl. Except for giant animals. What's your cap, Blair? Did you know that female Southern right whales, these are 50 foot long whales, will often choose to bring their babies into 30 foot shallow waters. They each winter will migrate by the thousands to Bay habitats to give birth and care for their young. Why do they choose this teeny tiny face to have their babies and to help raise them on their way around basically the whole world? Syracuse University's Biocoustics and Behavioral Ecology Lab, there's a clue in the name of the Research Institution recently uncovered a new potential motive. What could it be? They hypothesize that shallow, sandy, near shore waters are a prime spot for whales to birth and raise their young because those areas have reduced acoustic propagation, which means their vocal signals won't travel as far. So there's less chance of eavesdroppers when they're talking to babies. Yes, exactly. So this shed some new light on their migratory behavior and all the other things that they're trying to do and also could potentially allow research to better focus conservation and management efforts since all whales need our help. They gather data at three nursery sites across three continents in the Southern Hemisphere that's in South America, Africa and Australia. And they found the depth at which right-well mothers and their young are often observed and that depth has the most limited acoustic detection range for their calls. So previously Southern right whales have been shown to use three forms of acoustic crypsis. That is a way that an animal may change sound production behavior to reduce detectability by eavesdroppers, acoustic crypsis. They have been shown before to use three different types, reduction and call amplitude, that's a nice whisper, using signal frequencies that are difficult for eavesdroppers to detect and or localize. That's like really high or really low where other animals maybe don't totally understand what they're saying and also reduction or ceasing of acoustic signal production. That's just like not talking like in a quiet place, right? So effectively going silent. So these three types of acoustic crypsis have been known about in a few different types of animals but specifically in Southern right whales. This study proposes a fourth method of acoustic crypsis, which is all about habitat choice. They pick specific locations where they can hear each other but other animals can't hear them. So specifically avoiding eavesdropping by finding a place where their calls don't carry as far gives a new parameter to this ecological term of acoustic crypsis. That makes good sense, especially if you haven't taught the baby whales to, you know, shush. Is that whale whisper? Oh, I talked over, I gotta play it again. That's audio of a Southern right whale call recorded in shallow waters off the coast of Brazil by Julia Zeff from Syracuse University. There you go. Yeah, so the idea that some water carries sound better than other water. Now maybe I kind of wanna go into a pool and start making sounds in the shallow end of the pool versus the deep end of the pool and see how it's different. Well, yeah, well, what you're gonna need is one of those really neat landscaped pools that they have in places like resorts on Maui where you go and they've got all the land, the features. So there's the shallow pool where the little kids can play and then there's the deeper pool and they've got stuff in between that could block sound. So what I'm hearing is- Or you could just go in the ocean. Twist wants to fund a trip to Maui to try this technique. I think this would be very valuable research by this team. Great. I think I will agree with that for no other selfish reason than the thing that you were talking about there. You know, we're gonna pull up to the resort, we're gonna try out the pool with some tools. We're gonna scoot. You'll scoot, I will stick around for a nice frosty beverage. I mean, scoot as in, you know, give it a few days, gotta get over the jet lag before you pull back, you know. Anyway, anyway. Yeah, so right whales using shallow waters as a tool to hide their babies acoustically, love it. Now we know the whales are super smart, so the big question is, is this learned? Is this evolutionary? Do they just know? Is this, yeah, did somebody make them, you know? Oh, this is a great place to hide the babies. Now everybody- This is a great question, especially since this behavior is hardwired into their migratory pattern. So this is something that most likely has been taught to them over many generations. So when this first started happening, was it just selective pressure that less babies got at when they went into the shallow water? Or was this something that they were like, oh, I'm gonna go over there, it's actually better. So it's- There, yeah. Tough, tough to say. So I would imagine out of all of the creatures in the sea, there's probably not one that better understands the properties of acoustics than whales who communicate with sound over really great distances or right next to each other in their communications. It's probably a thing that they understand better than anything else in the ocean. Yeah, probably, although they've been in the ocean the least long, I would just remind you. Yeah, but they come from a, they come from being a creature that did rely at one point on audio much more so than the fish in the sea. Yep. You're talking about bats? You know, whales and bats are pretty closely related. Very closely, yeah. And right whales do that. Coming from land and using audio and then moving to the ocean and continuing to use audio in a way that creatures already in the ocean aren't using it. That's what I mean. So even though they've been there less long, the experience with using audio communication, I think is greater than anything else. Nothing no fish ever does this, but not like a whale. Come on. Now I wanna know what cows do. All right, let's move on. Moving on to seals and how they hunt underwater. So directly related to this, toothed whales often hunt in aphotic zones deep, deep, deep down in the ocean. And they are able to use biosonar or echolocation to find their prey. So exactly what we're talking about. All the stories are coming together. Yes, but how, how in the deep ocean blue do seals find their prey in the dark waters because they don't echolocate? How do they do it? It's the whiskers. Wiggle your whiskers. Okay, well, unlike humans, most mammals have vibratae, which are mobile facial whiskers. Now some humans have what we call whiskers, but they're not mobile. You can't kind of wiggle your face and have your mustache kind of flip up and back down. Oh, that would be, that would be awesome. But not without moving your entire upper lip. Yeah, I would actually grow facial hair just to be able to emote with it. With the whiskers. Yeah, it would be great. So would I. Anyway, most mammals have vibratae, which can do that. They can move around. It's the Latin word vibrio, which means to vibrate, which is so fun. Anyway, so the vibratae, until now researchers were not sure how the natural movement related to an actual function for these mammals. It's really hard to observe whisker movement and measure it in a natural environment and see the direct impact of the movement of the whiskers. So what researchers did is they placed small video loggers on free ranging northern elephant seals. Elephant seals are a really good choice because they have highly sensitive whiskers, but also because they go so deep in the ocean for so long. So those things combined made them a perfect study for the whiskers. They also have the highest number of nerve fibers per whisker of any animal. Elephant seals are so cool. Everyone when you are done here, Google elephant seals, read up on them. There's so much more to them than the nose. That's really fascinating because as a neuroscience student, you just always learn about the mouse and the rat barrel cortex where in the brain, there are these little barrel cortices. They look like barrels in the brain and each one corresponds to a whisker on the face of the rat. So it's just amazing to me that the seals, these sea lions are even more tied in. Kiki, it sounds like you've got to crack open an elephant seal brain and look at the barrels. No, no, I don't need to do that. I can let someone else do that. It's okay. Probably someone has. Or I can just appreciate them from afar. Yeah, you could probably look it up right now. Anyway, the researchers mounted video loggers on each seal's cheek to observe how the seal moves and how they use the whisker. They watched them forage in extreme environments, which is the deep dark ocean. The logger was equipped with an LED red infrared light flash, which was designed to not be visible to the seal, but instead to allow the researchers to non-invasively observe how the seals were using the whiskers. The seals captured moving prey by sensing water movement. They found based on the readings of these instruments and their whiskers extended forward ahead of their mouth when they sensed things nearby. They performed rhythmic whisker movement, protracting and retracting their whiskers to search for hydrodynamic cues. So they were basically trying to find the water movement of the fish nearby. It's like, oh, something's moving over there. They were able to search for their hydrodynamic cues with the whiskers, which is very similar to how terrestrial mammals use their whiskers when they're trying to sense things going on around them. They did try to take into consideration the possibility that bioluminescence could help them see where some prey is, but they found that while bioluminescence can be used, the whiskers were their primary method that they used to find prey. The bioluminescence was not the main thing that they used. This does solve a decade-long mystery about how deep diving seals locate their prey without biosonar. And so this also helps reveal another mammalian adaptation to complete darkness. Now we know mammals in general, we know if they're nocturnal, they have big whiskers. So we already know whiskers are related to darkness, but this was a measurable way to see how underwater mammals use the whiskers to navigate darkness. So the next step of this study is to conduct comparative field studies on other mammals, so to bring it back to the land side to better understand how whiskers sensing shapes natural behavior in different mammalian species in different environments. So basically they want to take these tools, they were effective in measuring whisker movement and what they used it for, and start mountain of munch and chillas and rats and all sorts of things. Hippos, everything with whiskers. Hippo whiskers, yes. I bet hippos use their whiskers for interesting things. They are nocturnal, so there you go. Fascinating. Wow, so these, okay, so these seals, they're really, each whisker is really tied into water movement to what happens where the prey's going, slight changes, just so sensitive that they can navigate in the dark. And it reminded me actually of whiskers field. Alligators, they have extra sensitive structures in their jaw and around their mouth so they can feel movements in the water. So this was what might be considered a convergent trait used to sense water movement so they can get fish snacks. Fish snacks, yeah. That's amazing. It probably is convergent as we're finding so many things are, it's what works best for ecology. You can figure out the echolocation that we were talking about before and get some of the brise going. You'll be like, hyper sensitive. You'll know everything that's going on around you. If they had both, can you, I'm now picturing alligators with whiskers. Oh, love it. They'd be pretty cute. So good, they're already so cute. Like catfish alligators. All right, Blair, is that it for the animal corner? That is it for the animal corner tonight. Justin, would you like to tell us how to navigate in our own world? With science? Oh my goodness. So, uh-oh, I got the wrong story. Hang on, hang on. Loading. That's not, okay, here we go. This is a, so I'm looking for stories for this week's show. I came across this title out of Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. The title of this study was Suicide Less Common in States that passed Medicaid expansion. Oh, so Medicaid expansion must be the thing that you need to look at when you're thinking about suicide. So we've recently been talking about, as has everybody, about guns and gun laws and gun deaths. We've also talked about general mortality in red states versus blue states on the show. So I read, so dived into this study to see what they were talking about. And boy, that was, it was a mistake. Kind of got, I kind of got, I almost got angry at the study. You know, I was reading it. So okay, according to the study, deaths by suicide have been on the rise everywhere in the U.S. over the last 20 years. Researchers tracked suicide rates in all 50 states from 2000 through 2018, during which the period there was a half a million suicides in the United States, which is a staggeringly big number. Apparently we do this more than other countries. States that expanded Medicaid eligibility, they started to do it in 2014. Researchers focused on the post expansion years, 2015 through 2018, to compare it to before. Before expansion, suicide rates were already 16% higher in states that later refused healthcare expansion. Now, suicide rates have been increasing. It's not just, the rate of suicide in the United States has been going up, it was, it's been going up 1% a year in the early 2000, and then it started going up 2% a year. So it's a serious problem. Before expansion, suicide rates are already 16% higher in these states that later turned down or refused to do the healthcare expansion. That rate was 17% after the other ones, then the ones that expanded later after the period. So after 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, they moved on to being 17% higher rate of suicide, as opposed to 16% rate of suicide, which the researchers said was statistically significant in that this was a correlation between healthcare and access to mental health services that has prevented these suicides. But it doesn't really show that, does it? All it actually shows is that if you separate out some of the deep red states, suicide rates, in this case, they're increasing everywhere, are rising a little higher there. They're already rising a little higher in red states. So if you just take a group of deep red states that turned down Medicaid expansion for political reasons, whatever, you should get that result. If you did the same study, the problem is that this is a correlation. If you did the same study and said, I wanna see how marijuana legalization and affected suicide rates, you'd see in that same grouping that there's more marijuana legalization on one side than the other, therefore it must be that. Or you could turn it around and say, access to healthcare leads to more marijuana legalization and more use of drugs, right? You can come up with all endless, ridiculous decisions on cause and effect on a two point correlation where you already had all of the data and could have put in all of the data from all of the other aspects that are in there. So part of the point the authors are trying to make is there's a correlation between healthcare and suicide in terms of access to mental health, which makes sense because the authors were psychologists. They're missing the point. The overriding issues statistically driving suicide rates is not mental illness, it's guns. There are plenty of red states that signed up for the expanded health coverage, some that have greater or lesser levels of gun use in blue states. Suicide rates are highest with the highest gun ownership states. And it's staggeringly high. So looking at Medicaid- That also is a correlation. Right, it is also a correlation. So, but if you're looking at Medicaid expansion loan, you're seeing the results of those state policies based on that one issue. You're in danger of mis-focusing the attention away from the root cause. It's not healthcare, it's access to guns. The states with the highest rate of suicide in the US, the state with the most is Wyoming. And it did not expand Medicaid, which looks like a good data point for what the researchers eventually concluded. But that state also has the nation's highest rate of gun ownership. Now, this is where statistical significance of your correlation is the thing I'm talking about. They have separated out this one group and they found this 1% change difference over this period. Here we go. So Alaska and Montana both did expand Medicaid, but they ranked just below Wyoming at gun ownership and suicide rates. And the rates are significantly different. California, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Illinois are states with the lowest suicide rates. They are also states that expanded Medicaid. But more importantly, they are the states with the strictest gun laws and some of the least gun ownership. So I think what's happening here is there's a lot of factors that are going to be conflicting. There's going to be, like you're saying, there's just a lot of factors. No, there's not. There's not a lot of factors. They go hand and they go hand in hand. There's not a lot. Here it is. The only way to prove causation is to manipulate a single variable. So what you need to do is take Wyoming, don't change anything about social structure or Medicaid or whether it's a red or a blue state, don't change anything at all. Don't let anyone move in or out. But give more gun regulations. Right, and regulate guns. And then do the opposite. Yeah, to another state that has the issue of Medicaid. Well, let me get to the numbers part because let's talk about statistically significant data. The majority of gun deaths in the United States are by suicide. Most of them, 54% of people killed by guns. But are the majority of, what is the percentage of suicides by gun? That's what I just said, 54%. That's the percentage of gun deaths. Let me start it over. The majority of suicides are not necessarily the same thing as suicides that are caused by gun death. Like we're looking at, that's two different data points. Wait, say that again because I think you just said the same thing. So you were talking about the percentage of gun deaths that are suicides. Kiki is asking what the percentage of suicides are that are gun deaths. By guns. I think that's the same thing. It is not the same thing. It's not the same thing. That's gonna be a different number and it's a different analysis. Hang on, okay, let me focus in again. Say it again because I somehow have missed it. The percentage of gun deaths that are suicides versus the percentage of suicides that are gun deaths. Ah, gotcha. So, correct, correct. So, 54% nationwide of gun deaths are suicide. Suicide is the leading cause of a gun killing somebody. 54%. Now, what you're talking about is what percentage of suicides themselves are by gun. Gotcha. Yeah, so I got that. And that's the number that gets really significant. Majority of all suicides used a gun to commit the act, right? Rates of suicide by gun are the highest in states with the highest rates of gun ownership. The major threat then to somebody in a crisis is not whether or not they have access to mental health services through Medicaid expansion programs that will allow them to make an appointment to see a healthcare worker specialist at some points whether or not they have a gun in their hand while they are considering suicide. To even begin to frame it in any other way, I think is tough. So, here's what you're asking. In Alaska and Montana, which did expand Medicaid, they have two of the highest rates of gun ownership in the United States. 54% and 66% of people have guns, owned guns. In New Jersey and New York, which also expanded, they have some of the lowest rates, 15 to 20% gun ownership. Alaska and Montana have suicide rates by gun that are 750% higher than in New York and New Jersey. Now, if you just, how much, what's the difference in suicide rates, it's about 300, 400%. So, it's already three to four times more likely for somebody to commit suicide in Montana and Alaska. But it's 750% more likely that they will have used a gun. So, this is the main mechanism involved in suicide. The 1% variable difference between somebody with Medicaid or the access to this is statistically significant, meaning that that number is different, but it's not socially significant. It's not solution significant in any way. And I thought that it was particularly bad timing, even if you had done this correlative study that pats yourself on the back and says that you're important to a big social problem, putting out the paper while we're doing gun legislation in the wake of all these deaths and say, hey, here's a study that you can say is statistically significant that says access to mental health plays a role. No, it's not. It does play a role. It does. That's frustrating that. Not bringing that. This is what's frustrating me is that you are, yes, these are related issues. They are related. Gun regulation, having access to guns as the data shows that you have provided here is a primary factor in the ability of somebody to commit suicide. But before that, if there is access to mental health, if there is access to Medicare, Medicaid, things that have been expanded, if then you have preventative services. So these things do go hand in hand. They are not all by themselves. And so I don't think arguing one without the other is... And I think that's the frustrating part for me. You're correct that you want to prevent, Justin, you want to prevent the ability to carry through with the act. I understand that. But there is still an underwhelming issue of someone having suicidal thoughts or facing suicide as a problem also. And I think that's what Kiki's getting at, right? Is it like, you want to make it harder for people to go through with it when they are facing a crisis. But you also need to care for people in crisis. You need to be able to do both. And that's where I am also understanding and saying, Justin, that it is insanely frustrating that there are people out there who want information to prevent doing both. They want to use it as an or, not an and. It's not or, it's and. We need both. So I'm not trying to discount the need for mental health, but doing a correlative, again, that you could have done by any sort of basis of knowing the difference between the deep red state and the rest of the nation, you could have said that access to mental health care leads to greater drug use. You could have said that just as easily, right? You could come up with anything you want. But when you have New Jersey, Wyoming, having a thousand times higher rate per capita in New Jersey, 1,000% higher rate of, and talk about if they only had access to a little bit of health care. There's something rotten in the state of Denmark. I just dropped it. So I know Denmark's fine. Denmark doesn't. I mean, gosh, Wyoming, I didn't realize this about Wyoming until the looking into this. Wyoming must have the highest suicide rate in the world if you took it as a standalone versus any country. It's staggering. We had, okay, you know, and the people from New Jersey, they got really low suicide rates and they live in New Jersey. It's just the world just doesn't make sense. There was also some other interesting things about that gun ownership when I was looking at this per state correlated to gun deaths almost perfectly. What was really interesting is that Wyoming has one of the lowest murder rates in the nation. One of the lowest per capita murder rates, but their death by gun is still one of the highest because it all turned into suicides. And there's some places like Maryland, they've got almost no suicides per gun owner, kind of the situation going on, but they have a really high murder rate. But because they have less guns overall, the death by gun rate is much lower than these states that have. That tracks very well. I don't know, I got really irritated because it looked like a very self-serving, biased study. And to put it out at a time when there are false claims that gun deaths and violence is a mental health issue and not a gun issue, it very clearly isn't when somebody is at their weakest moment in life and they have a gun in their hand, they're likely outcomes are very different than if they did not have a gun in their hand. And I don't think most people realize that most of the gun deaths in the United States are suicide. I didn't know that until looking at this. Yeah, there's definitely some numbers to look at in there. Yeah. And it goes, these are important things to talk about, but I do want anyone out there who knows anyone or is personally in crisis or might be considering any aspects of self-harm to get in touch with the National Suicide Prevention Hotline. There are the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline website. There's a phone number that you can call. And before you do that. 988 has been designated as the new three digit dialing code that will route callers to this lifeline. In the United States. Before you do that, though, get rid of your gun. Yes. If you own one and you know you're having trouble, get it the heck away from you. Get it far, far away. Is that it for your section of the show, Justin? Done. You're done. Well, I got some brains for everyone. So hopefully we can bring it back up with some lighter topics. Are we born knowing right from wrong? Are we born with a moral compass? If we see another individual hurt someone else, do we know from early on that that's bad? Yes. When do we learn these things? How do we put them together? So researchers published this from Osaka University published in Nature, Human Behavior, their study that I find so fascinating because I mean, the bottom line is that they made eight months old, look at a computer screen with little animated, not little animated little heads with like squares with eyes on them to make them look kind of humanish, animalish and had the babies watch one of these little humanish animated things go and push another animated little thingy and then by staring, they could destroy the evildoer. By staring for a long period of time, like eight seconds, 10 seconds at the pusher, it would then the little computer screen would drop a block on top of the evildoer. It's this to me is just a fantastic experiment by these researchers using eye gaze in preverbal children, eight month olds, to determine whether they know right from wrong. And they did a whole bunch of variations on the experiment to figure out whether or not this is really what was going on in little baby's brains. So in the end, the result is that, yeah, at the age of eight months old, a baby can look at one humanish little block eyeballed character on a computer screen doing harm to another and destroy them with their mind. The babies in this experiment more often than not destroyed the wrongdoer in the situation. Which is fascinating. I mean, by a month old, eight months old, babies are starting to get a sense of the world. They definitely are communicating through movement and they've got interactions with you and the rest of the world. And I wonder, is this instinctual or is this learned? Because by eight months, the babies have had eight months of their parents or other caregivers saying, don't do that, don't push your brother or if they have siblings, don't hit the baby, you know, these kinds of things. Don't pull the cat's tail. Don't pull the cat's tail. Yeah, there's all sorts of behavioral modifications that are already going on by eight months of age. And then in this study situation, the researchers though, based on the results, they suggest that an early understanding of morality is hardwired into our brains, into our behaviors. Maybe it's just hardwired for easy learning, but it's hardwired in because it would help us survive, would have helped us survive evolutionarily. So they're kind of giving it an evolutionary psychology kind of explanation that has led into this, but yeah, it's an interesting question. So if you look at primates and especially great apes, it's a very social structure. There's lots of social interactions and those interactions start from an extremely young age and so it would track for these things to be hardwired. So they act appropriately inside of a troop from essentially day one. Right. What I'm confused about with this experiment design is this doesn't sound like morality to me, this sounds like corporal punishment. You do something bad, you get destroyed. That's kind of scary to me. Well, I mean, there's not gonna be much room for nuance in the eight month old brain, I think. I think that. Oh, I don't know about that. But I would like to see something where it's like, there was an uneven allocation of things somehow, right? But I guess that's hard to convey, but this is just so strange as a design because it does involve like judgment and inflicting harm, which is, I would argue is very different from morality and a sense of right and wrong. So the question is, yeah, there were no controllers, there was just tracking eye gaze. So I am putting, I am definitely putting thoughts in the eight month old brain of destroying the evildoer. I will cop to being a little, not being completely scientifically unbiased here. The eight month old is potentially going to be more interested in what's going to happen to the evildoer, the wrongdoer. Maybe it doesn't believe that it's destroying. Maybe it's agreeing with. That it is inflicting punishment because all it's doing is looking and the baby has learned that it looks, if it looks at the wrongdoer long enough that something will happen to it, but the cause and effect is not necessarily in their brain. Necessarily, what were you gonna say? Oh, sorry, go ahead. Oh, this seems more, maybe it's just more fascinated by the evildoer. Like, yeah, I gotta watch that guy. He seems to know how things work around here. Or it's the, I need to watch the wrongdoer and watch out for them. That wasn't, or there's something not okay or there's something different. And so we know that animals, we know that babies extend the length of their gaze, how long they look at something when there's novelty involved, when there's something unexpected, when, you know, so this is an individual doing something that the baby did not expect. Yeah, so Rod Haglund in the chat room in YouTube is saying, are they punishing evil or eliminating a threat? Which is exactly what you're talking about. Is it, are they passing down judgment because they were mean? Or are they going, oh God, I gotta pay attention to this guy, he's mean. He's gonna hurt me. I got it, I have to just pay attention. Or that was, why they do that? What just happened there? I think they're competing. You wanna be, you don't wanna be the runt and you gotta take out the competition. That's who, you know, that's how you do it. It's a baby eat, baby world out there. Next thing you know, we're gonna have a little posse of eight month olds who grow up to just stare awkwardly at people. And you know that they're thinking about mind control. I'm gonna punish you with my mind. Yeah, but the experimental design for this is very fascinating and it's, yeah. Very interesting question. How early do babies know these things? What's good, what's bad, what's wrong, what's right? They're interested, that's for sure. Moving on to more brainy things because you know how much I like the brainy things. Let's talk about our brain temperature. Do you think that your brain temperature is the same as your body temperature? Oh, I always kind of assumed everything on the inside is all the same temperature. Yeah, I've never given any thought to it at all. Right, you don't necessarily think about it so much but according to this new study that is in brain communications, researchers have analyzed using magnetic thermometry. They've been able to use magnetic resonance spectroscopy to determine the internal temperature of brains. And what they've looked at, they've determined that your brain's temperature varies throughout the day, that it tends to exceed your body temperature by about one degree Celsius of 100 patients who were eligible for brain temperature rhythm analysis. 25 displayed daily rhythm and the brain temperature range decreases in older patients. So the older patients had lower temperatures inside their brain but yeah, overall the brain temperature exceeds overall, the brain temperature exceeds your body temperature. So why, why, why, why are they interested in this? Well, it turns out according to their analysis that patients whose brain temperatures were less likely to vary during the day and were very stable during the day, they were less likely to survive brain injury. And so we also found that women who were post ovulation had higher temperatures than pre ovulation or during menstruation. So, and women often had higher brain temperatures than men. So there are very interesting variations in brain temperature. And when we do brain surgery, very often the whole goal is keep it cool. Don't let inflammation happen. Don't let the brain and just don't let the brain temperature change, but the reality is that a healthy brain does change its temperature. It's hotter than the body's normal temperature and it varies throughout the day and it varies according to a woman's cycle and it varies between men and women. So there's a lot going on that could help in the treatment of brain injuries and could help people with traumatic brain injury perhaps recover better if we understood this more clearly. Right, you're like, oh, my brain, of course it's this body temperature, there you go. No, it is not and it changes, which is fascinating. A whole new field of research. Go have fun, postdocs. You can stick a thermometer in it. Well, no, don't go do that, but yeah. I mean, I'm sure you could. You could, but the spectroscopy of the brain it's fantastic. How do you feel when people wake you up when you're sleeping? You're like, I've been sleeping and then they wake you up and you don't get good sleep. How does that make you feel? I wasn't expecting to be woken up is what you're saying. Yes, you are not. Oh, so why is the world, sometimes light, whose idea was light? Yeah. I'm up, I'm up. What's wrong? Well, another of my favorite studies from this week is published in Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews. They did a meta-analysis looking at what happens to people when they get woken up and they don't get enough sleep. And so according to their meta-analysis, sleep or lack of sleep is associated with stress and aggression. And so then the researcher said, well, let's test that. So they woke a whole bunch of people up a lot during their experiment and it made those people stressed out and aggressive. Ta-da, science. Science. Yeah, that sounds correct. Excuse me. These findings suggest that poorer sleep is associated with and leads to heightened levels of subjective stress and aggression, these findings and their implications are discussed in relation to neurobiological literature, which highlights the complex interplay between metabolic activity in the brain, hormonal changes and behavior. I think... Edward leads rise to the old saying, I love you more than coffee, but not before. Not before. Let the sleeping people lie. Yes, I find it fascinating that this question in particular was a point of inquiry. As well we are, as well so many of us know that our sleep is so important. So we know sleep's important. We know we shouldn't interrupt normal sleep patterns. We also know that teenagers have specific sleep windows that are different from adults, which are different from young children, which are different from older adults. We also know that there's very specific amounts of sleep that people need and all this kind, but we're not gonna change anything as a society. We're just gonna keep demanding that everyone wake up at the same time and get the same amount of sleep and show up at the same time in the same place and expect the same kind of performance, no matter what. No matter what, even though Allen might have kept you up all night. Yeah. Allen. Well, that's cause your employer wants you to there when they want you there, Claire. And that's how having an employer works. That's how jobs are. It's important for our society. Oh, this whole loop back. But if Allen weren't around, maybe I'd learn to echolocate a little bit more. This brings us full circle to the fact that I'm not in Denmark, it's dark outside, and we have come to the end of our show. It might still be the brightest day in Justin's neck of the woods right now. Oh yeah, it's getting brighter. It's getting brighter as we talk, yeah. But it is time for us to finish up this show. So I would like to thank you all for joining us for another episode. Thank you for listening. Thank you for being here. I hope you enjoyed it. Shout outs, shout outs to Fada. Thank you so much for your help with social media, show notes, show descriptions, Gord, Identity Four. Gord, Aran, others for the chat room and keeping it happy in there. Identity Four, thank you for recording the show. And Rachel, thank you for your editing and assistance. Additionally, I of course, would like to thank our Patreon sponsors. Thank you too, Teresa Smith, James Schofer, Richard Badge, Kent Northcote, Rick Loven, Pierre Velazard, Ralphie Figueroa, John Ratnaswamy, Carl Korfeld, Karen Taze, Woody M.S., Chris Wozniak, Dave Bunn, Vigard Shevstad, Hal Snyder, Donathan Stiles, aka Don Stilo, John Lee, Ellie Coffin, McGrath Sharma, Reagan, Derek Schmidt, Don Mundus, Stephen Albaron, Nero Meyshak, Stu Pollack, Andrew Swanson, Fredas104, Guy Luke, Paul Roenevich, Kevin Reardon, Noodles Jack, Brian Carrington, Matt Bass, Boat Fado for Texas, John McKee, Greg Riley, Marcesson Flow, Jean Tellier, Steve Leesman, aka Seema, Ken Hayes, Howard Tan, Christopher Rappin, Dana Pearson, Richard Brendan Minnish, Johnny Gridley, Remy Day, Flying Out, Christopher Dreyer, Artie, I'm Greg Briggs, John Atwood, Greedy Garcia, Dave Wilkinson, Rodney Lewis, Paul, Phillip Shane, Kurt Larson, Sue Doster, Jason Olds, Dave Naver, Eric Nappy, O. Kevin Parachan, Aaron Luthin, Steve DeBell, Bob Calder, Marjorie Paul, Disney, David Simmerly, Patrick Precaro, Tony Steele, and Jason Roberts. Thank you all for your support on Patreon. And if you would like to support us on Patreon, head over to twist.org and click on the Patreon link on next week's show. We will be back broadcasting Wednesday, 8 p.m. Pacific time from YouTube and Facebook channels and from twist.org slash live. Do you wanna listen to us as a podcast? Do you wanna listen to us as a podcast? Trying that again? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Maybe you will listen as you try to fan your brain to keep it nice and cool, or I guess keep it hotter, put a nice towel on it, either way. Just search for This Week in Science or our podcasts are found. If you enjoyed the show, get your friends to subscribe as well. For more information on anything you've heard here today, show notes and links to stories will be available via our website, www.twist.org, where you can also sign up for our bi-decadal newsletter. I mean, it'll come when you're least expecting it. Just keep an eye out. You can contact us directly email Kirsten at kirsten at thisweekinscience.com, Justin at twistminion at gmail.com or me Blair at BlairBazz at twist.org and don't confuse the suffixes on those emails because they're all different. Just put twist T-W-I-S in the subject line of that email or it will get spam-filtered into a whispered whale song. In the Shallows. Where it is no doubt better. In the Shallalos. Reposted tens of thousands of time on the Twitter where we are at twist science, at Dr. Kiki at Jackson Flyin' Up, Blair's from Nazary. We love your feedback. If there's a topic you would like us to cover or address a suggestion for an interview, a haiku that comes due in the night, please let us know. We'll be back here next week and we hope you'll join us again for more great science news. And if you've learned anything from the show, remember. It's all in your head. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science is the end of the world. So I'm setting up shop, got my banner on furrow. It says the scientist is in. I'm gonna sell my advice. Show them how to sell their robots with a simple device. I'll reverse all the warming with a wave of my hand. And all it'll cost you is a couple of grand. This Week in Science is coming your way. So everybody listen to what I say. I use the scientific method for all that it's worth. And I'll broadcast my opinion all over the air. Cause it's this Week in Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. Science. Science. Science. This Week in Science. Science. Science. This Week in Science. Science. Science. Science. I've got one disclaimer and it shouldn't be news. That what I say may not represent your ovulation. You just might understand. Yeah, yeah. Thank you. Thank you everyone. Thank you for drink. Oh, noodles. That is a cute little kitty gift. Thank you very much. Thank you everybody for being here. Where did Justin go? He went away. Justin is in Denmark. Where are you? Things rotten in the state of Justin. Ha ha ha ha. That was fun. Fun. Oh, here comes the desk lowering. I'm wearing my... She's sitting again. Fabulous. I hope you're... I hope you enjoyed it. Paul, I hope we made your days end enjoyable. Everybody. Every day is a new one. But every day's end can end at least once a week with twists. This is the end. For this week, again next week, for twists. Boop, boop, boop. The internet was weird today. The internet was weird today. There were a lot of hiccups. We were stepping on each other a lot, a little bummer. I did a speed test right before the show. My internet was great. I don't... It was very strange. It just happens sometimes, right? Like it doesn't sync up great. There's nothing to be done about it. Thank you, Gaurav. Thank you. Yeah, the internets. There's nothing we can do about the internets. We can do what we can do to make sure we have the good connection. And we've got the things in the places that are supposed to be there. Make it the best that, from our perspective, we possibly can. But sometimes it doesn't cooperate. And that is what it is. Yeah, so the James Webb, they are going to have the first science images coming out in July. I think July 13th, 14th, I think they said is when they're going to come out. That's surprising. After all of the hiccups with getting it up there, I kind of expected things to take longer. They're doing great. Yeah. Yeah. And they apparently, July 12th, thank you, Gaurav. Apparently one of its mirrors, C something or other, did get impacted by a little teeny, teeny, teeny, tiny meter, right? Little tiny speck of dust in space. Oh, no. Yeah. Gaurav, I love that you marked it on your calendar already. That's fantastic. Yeah. Let's see, Fada was asking about the baby story earlier. Could it have been the baby was following the figure on the screen simply because it was doing the most movement and that would be attracting the baby the most at that stage of development? No, because they did different variations in which the characters moved around in different ways to control for that kind of stuff. Different colors, different, yeah. And they had babies who'd been trained up on another version, come and play another version. Like, yeah, they did all sorts of reverse experiments and tested all that stuff out. They did science. They did science with babies, which is just awesome. Yeah. Justin, would you take your baby to do science and let them destroy little animated rocks with their minds? I can hear you. Are you muted? I say, yeah, it totally sounds like fun. Yeah. I think that would be a lot of fun. Hey, baby, go stare at the screen. This is the only screen time you're going to get. Yeah, it's amazing how attractive a screen is already. Yeah. Where are we at? We're heading into month five. Is it really month five already? I mean, I know this logically, but emotionally, I cannot believe it. Almost. Yeah. Wow, you're out of the first baby or the fourth trimester. You're into getting into the fun baby times. Heading into the fourth tooth. Oh, fourth tooth. Oh, my gosh. They're coming quick. They're coming, quick. Yeah. My goodness. Month five and six. I think that's when I was like, oh, you're really fun now. He's already a blast. Yeah. He's already a fun guy to hang out with. A fun guy. Don't call your baby a mushroom. The mother did get a degree in bongal genomics. That's funny. I like this humor. Justin, are you going to sleep today? Yeah, probably uncontrollably so. So it's now seven in the morning. The show started at five in the morning. I didn't sleep in the overnight. When I go the other direction, because I'm already a bit of an insomniac, I belong on a planet with a 28-hour day. It's probably just right for me. When I go the other direction, I have no problem with the 10-hour flight and it being the same time as I left. The rest of that day goes fine. I go to sleep at a reasonable hour. Perfect. Come back the other way and it's completely discombobulating. So yeah, I've been uncontrollably day-sleeping. You know what you do? Get tired. It's that thing where you get tired. Try to fight it. You know what? I'll just fight it. I'll have a cup of coffee and then, oh wow, maybe I'm going to nod off for a few minutes. Just close my eyes here. Six hours later, I did like that. Night sleep during the day. Oh gosh. And then the other day, a couple of days ago, I went to bed at the nighttime at a reasonable-ish hour and I got a great night's sleep. Only it was an hour and a half later. Slowly. It's like an hour. You're going to march forward. I'm taking my little siestas in the night and I'm doing the full sleep during the day. But yeah, I'm getting suggestions. I might need to do some melatonin. Melatonin. Yeah. But if I do it now... No, we'll go to sleep. I got to keep drinking coffee until I either stay awake long enough to go back to sleep at a reasonable hour or just have a heart attack. Oh, don't do that. I'd prefer you didn't do that. That's the other way of doing it. Yeah, so what you need to do is like at, I don't know, if you can stay awake, I mean, maybe take a little nap if you can actually take a nap. That's the thing. But you need to stay awake. You need to stay awake until like at least, what, like seven o'clock? Seven o'clock? That would be reasonable-ish. It's early, but that's a time to make it too. Like seven o'clock. Close all of the drapes, make it dark. And then, so there's no light getting in and you take your melatonin and then you go to sleep and try and get as much sleep as you can. And then in the morning, you expose yourself to sunlight or to bright light, like first thing in the morning. And that'll help you start shifting it. Okay. But you take the melatonin before you go to sleep and that'll help you set the clock and then wake up and expose yourself to light and that will set your circadian. Because I had the idea- It takes a few days. I've been trying to do it wrong. That's what the problem is. I kept trying to take it after I went to sleep. And it just, I would forget. You're already asleep. That's not going to work. This time, this time, now I've got the advice from the good doctor. I won't take the pill before. Before you go to sleep. See if that has this. Yeah. It's just so, it's just, I don't even have to think about it going the other way. It's just like, there's no difference at all. Nothing has changed. It's just fine. It's just this way. Every time I came back from Israel, I always thought I was fine. And then like three days later, you're like, oh no. I've done it now. I don't feel good now. I don't feel so good. Well, I feel like it's the better me when I go from the east to the west. Because then I'm going to bed at like eight, nine o'clock at night. I'm getting up around four or five in the morning. Yeah, that's a good healthy farmer's way to start the day. Get up before the birds are looking for worms or whatever. But then you come back the other way and I'm like, oh gosh, I'm awake all through the night. It's like a methodic living in this house now. It doesn't sleep like a vampire methodic, not sleeping in a nocturnal vampire methodic, not sleeping through the whole night. Well, you either need to buckle down and stay awake as long as you can and just start pushing that envelope, or you just go on tired now and it'll take longer to adjust back. Michelle Kelly is saying if you have enough melatonin already, it can keep you awake. And I've experienced that. That's one of the things too, is I've experienced taking a melatonin pill and then just having this weird nervous energy where I could not sleep no matter what. Yeah. Well, the most important thing is the light first thing in the morning. So when you wake up in the morning, bright light. Wake up in the morning and you go outside. What if I sleep with the lights on? What if I'm sleeping with the lights on already? Then you've got other problems. Dang, Alan again. This is everything. Alan, go away. And apologies to any Alan's out there. I mean, Karen's had to deal with this for years. So now Alan has to deal with a little bit of hot water. Yeah. Sorry, bud. Everyone tired again. What's going on? Yeah, what? What, Justin? Oh, never mind. Oh, there was a story. There was a story that I looked at that I didn't bring that was sort of interesting. I was going to see if I could pull it up, but the interwebs on this computer don't like it when I try to open a tab while we're doing the live streaming. That showed children who had exposure to black carbon specifically one of the puts of diesel had higher experience, higher air pollution and pre adolescence and as younger children had higher rates of brain connectivity. Did you come across that one? Which ones had more? What was that again? I was looking at some overlay things. It was the children exposed to pollution had greater had greater levels of brain connectivity. That's weird. Very. That seems right. That seems like, yeah, I wonder what is behind that. It's not complete outcome. It's not a complete outcome story. It's not saying like that had a negative effect a positive effect. It's just brain scanning stuff of young children and had a greater connectivity in the default mode and then whatever the active mode or whatever that other mode is that that was that. Okay. Changes in brain connectivity. Higher exposure is associated with higher functional brain connectivity in pre adolescence. Exposure to traffic noise was not. Which I thought was interesting because that was very much like the story Blair brought the last week. Yeah. That was specifically academic performance, which I guess is different. Well, I think this one might have been, that's why I was like, I also got confused about like, is this the study that Blair was talking about? Because they also were saying that it, the noise at home didn't have any influence on it. So I was like, is this connected to the same? I don't know if it was, was that a Dutch study last time? It was, he was South American actually. Interesting because it was like, it seemed to be saying some of the same stuff as that other study. So I was like, is this the, did it come out the wrong week? Did I miss a big part of the last one? Like it was, it, it raised some doubts when I was, and then I found other stuff. But we found, so maybe, you know, there's a good side. Maybe this is why the city kids are talking so fast. It's all that brain pollution. Oh boy. Yeah, they say they still need to, we still have to understand the consequences of this increased activity of both networks and resting conditions. But for now we can say that the brain connectivity and children exposed to higher levels of air pollution is different from what we would expect. Yeah. Well, I think that's the aspect of nitrous oxide and particulate matter. But I also wonder if there's a little bit of a bias against pollution, which we should be biased against to some degree. There's been a whole lot of, oh yeah, exposure to chemicals. It turns out it's doing great things to our bodies. And also, also also always noticing that the, what is it? The American chemistry association or whatever it is. Never comes out with health warnings about chemicals. It always just talks about advances in ways that chemicals make life better. But these are, these are sort of biases that are just out there. Yeah. But I think though, if we had looked at this, if this had been a study on the effects of eating a non-dairy organic diet and saw greater levels of brain connectivity, they would have said, hey look, this healthy diet is associated with greater levels of brain activity and connectivity. And we'd have been like, oh wow, hey, let's all eat healthy and just move along. But they, they're like, they're like, oh wait, we've seen a positive correlation potentially in these children's brain connectivity due to exposure to pollution. Wait, wait, wait, wait a second. I knew we need to look at this one. Look at this one a little harder before we say anything conclucinatory about it. Conclucinatory? No, that's a word. It is not. I really like it. It's probably not, but I'm going to roll with it anyway. Take it. Yeah, Michelle Kelly, could that extra activity cause anxiety, depression? Sure, but what if it just makes them smarter? Hang on, could you handle that? Could we, could we as a society handle the fact that our exposure to black carbon that we've placed under our children actually made them. Can you say that's probably an inaccurate conclusion? No, it is. It is. It's all inaccurate conclusions, but that's the point. That's the point. We're talking about a correlation without looking at all the outcomes. Yeah. And, and if we hadn't had it, if it hadn't been pollution, if that was eating blueberries shows greater connectivity in these two functioning connectivity in these two regions of the brain, we would have said, you know what, I've heard all I need to, I'm going to make sure my kid eats plenty of blueberries, but nobody right now hopefully is saying, you know what, I think I'm going to move my child to some diesel emissions. Cause that, but cause we have a, maybe a healthy bias in these situations, but I just, I love those words of caution at the end of the, like, here's what we found. Sorry. Sorry. Well, and this is like, this is also probably part of that, like what's it called, publish or perish kind of idea too that it's possible somebody's publishing this weird study before they can really do the, the, the kind of the look back that they should because they need to finish their PhD, right? It's, I don't know that, but that's possible. Is it a lot of times things are published because they're like, I got to publish something. That's dumb. Everyone has biases. The whole point of the scientific method is to find ways to remove those from analysis. Right. Yes. I'm glad you said from analysis. I was like, I was expecting you to say, remove the biases. Like, uh, Justin, well, possible. Well, you, you try to remove them. Uh, also, uh, you try to remove the scientist biases from the experimental conditions. Right. And from the analysis. And it's, it's a, it's the part of the, gosh, one of the toughest things that is done in science. And it's why I was also picking on that psychology study. Cause I, I have my experiences. They're like the worst study offenders when it comes to bias. Uh, it's just, you don't, you won't see that as much in fields that have not, don't have to deal with humans, quite frankly. Like, and now analyzing humans as a human is just incredibly difficult thing to do. Um, it's, it's a tough job. I'm not trying to say that it's a sham field, but gosh, sometimes it's just obvious that somebody didn't, didn't think. Well, some, I mean, sometimes when things get published, right? Yeah. No. No. They, they probably, they might have submitted it a while ago and then timing of publication. Yeah. But they were probably using current events for getting the word out more about their work. I don't know. No, no. I want to make some overlays for. Well, and I guess I was still talking about the thing is like too, is like, if you're going to do an analysis, I get the idea that you, you can break something down to this versus that to look for causational stuff. Right. If you, you're sort of limiting the interactions and options of data that you're looking at, but you, but you usually are going to do this to isolate down to a causal, you're looking for a mechanism, you're looking for causality, you're looking for, if we remove all these other factors, does this still happen? When you're doing it with data sets that are already in existence, then it becomes, that's when bias can really play in because you can limit yourself, you can limit contradictory information very easily by tuning what you're focused on and tuning where you're going to look. And that's, that's the thing that seems to happen. And then, and then coming to conclusions off of correlations is also something that happens much more in, in psychology than you will see in the medical field. Medical field, you're like, oh, this leads to a, we're always making fun of the early cancer studies. This is going to lead to a pathway to explore the idea that something in this region that we were looking at might have something to do with it. Psychologists go, aha, two data points, which is really, this was just data point. Now it wasn't anything more than that. Two data points. Let's make conclusions about society and the role of our profession in it based on data points. Couple of. We've decided our significant. And also, by the way, when I was saying that one group is 1% higher than the other, that's in the different, it's the differences off of a number that's below 1%. It's, I mean, it's significantly statistical in that it exists, not statistically significant as a driver causational mechanism to itself. It's still really irritating. I'm thinking, I'm thinking you got the, you got the guy coming out of the ambulance and somebody's like, you know, working a breather, keep them breathing. And then there's a doctor. He's like, oh, come over here and let me give him a shot of this drug that'll restart his heart. And they're putting them, hooking up to the AKG. And then somewhere over in the background is also somebody in medical, you gotta go. Did he mention anything about his mother? What was his relationship to his siblings? It's not important. Stop. We have a, we have a heart attack. We have a big mechanism that we have identified that's associated. And if you eliminate that from your consideration, you're ignoring. Oh gosh. Ignore all the things. I want to ignore, but I can't. I cannot beat box. I know that for a fact. Oh man. Is that what that was? No. No, it wasn't. No. No. No. That wasn't just other sound effects. Okay. Who needs blueberries? We all need blueberries. Blueberry. Blueberry pie. I don't know why. There's a whole song about blueberry pie. There is a whole song about blue. Wow. You just transported me back to my childhood. In a moment. This is a story, a song about blueberries. That was me echo locating. Yes. Wow. Huh. Feel so berry, berry blue. Paul, I need some sleep as well. I think it's time for us to get the sleep. Justin, you stay up. Don't go to sleep. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Don't go to sleep. The rest of us need the rest. It's good for our eyes. Good for our brains. Reducing stress and aggression. So that we're all nice to each other. Oh, Eric nap. Yes. Get your sleep. Got a COVID booster. Awesome. Hopefully that'll. Continue to keep you protected. Everyone out there. Thank you so much for joining us. I think it's, it's time. So what do we say right now? Say good night, Blair. Good night, Blair. Say good night, Justin. I can't. Good morning, Justin. Good morning, Justin. Good morning, Justin. Good night, Kiki. Good night, everyone. Thank you for joining us for another episode. And we do hope to see you next week. Cause we will be back. And in the meantime, I'm sure to watch all those wonderful science holidays that are happening in the next few weeks on the twist calendar and they're out there. All the good stuff is out there. Keep your eyes peeled. Stay safe. Stay healthy. Get your sleep. Stay curious. We'll see you next week.