 It's not talk like a pirate day. Oh, it's talk like a pirate day around here. This is TWIS, this week in Science, episode number 585, recorded on Wednesday, September 21st, 2016. Words and gibberish. Hey, everyone, I am Dr. Kiki. And tonight on This Week in Science, we are going to fill your heads with synchronized signals, camouflaged dinos, and micro-robots. But first. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. The best thing you can do for your brain is use it. But that advice, however, to what may seem, is not complete. There is more to having a brain than simply taking it out for a thought once in a while. You have to feed your brain, and not just anything. Good quality thoughts. Otherwise, your brain may become listless and gassy. You must care for your brain, bathe it in oxygen-rich blood, train it to do tricks like math, language, and art. Teach it to get along well with other brains. And remember, how well you care for your brain today will determine how well your brain will care for you tomorrow. Yes, the best thing you can do for your brain is use it. But the best thing you can do for yourself is use it wisely. And wisely, your brain has brought you here so that together, the two of you can enjoy yet another episode of This Week in Science. Coming up next. MUSIC PLAYING Got the kind of mind that can't get enough. I want to learn everything. I want to fill it all up with new discoveries that happen every day of the week. There's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek. I want to know what's happening. What's happening. What's happening this week in science? What's happening. What's happening. What's happening this week in science? Good science to you, Kiki and Blair. And good science to you, Justin Blair. And everyone out there, welcome to another science-filled episode of This Week in Science. Man, last week was like, oh, there's a few stories. This week, it's like, oh, the stories from last week showed up this week. It's like, bazillion stories. I have a whole show of stories that didn't make it to the rundowns, so I'll be social media-ing those things for the rest of the week for those of you who are interested in that. Lots of cool stories out there. But on the show tonight, the ones that made the cut. I have stories about galactic rotation, water bears, because who doesn't love a water bear? And how we finish each other's sentences. Sandwiches. Yeah. Sandwiches? No. Justin, what do you have? I've got an island murder mystery. Whoa. Dino camo, and aboriginal origins. Very nice. And Blair. Oh, I have bird brains. I have cow malaria. And I have yeast. OK. I didn't think it's a compliment. Yeah, the bird brain, that's always a compliment. The cow malaria, I'm not so sure about. Yeast, I hope you are fermenting something for me. Oh, I just might be. It's for you. It's extra special. Yeah, fermented bird brains? No. Right. OK, moving on. The delicacy of the night is not fermented bird brains. We've got stories to run down right now. Science, science, science. Tartigrades have, you know, a secret protection. They can do anything. Tartigrades, they can. They can survive being frozen for 30 years. They can travel through space on. I mean, this is what we hypothesize. They could potentially travel through space on meteors and asteroids. Well, they've gone to space. We have gone to space. They've survived. But how do they do it? Space, especially. This is the big one. And this is the one that interests us a lot, because as human beings, we would like to go to space and not be damaged by the radiation that is out there. Because, you know, not only is there not a lot of air or anything in space. There's a lot of empty space, right? There is a lot of radiation. And it's really damaging to our DNA. And if we want to get off this planet, we're going to need to figure out a way around it. Well, some researchers were looking at the DNA of tardigrades, because, OK, they're great with radiation. How do they do it, though? What is their secret? What's the tardigrade secret recipe, the secret sauce? Well, turns out they have a gene that the researchers call D-S-U-P. S-U-P-D, no, D-S-U-P. Is that your rap name? Yeah, D-S-U-P. D-S-U-P. This is what they call this gene. And the gene seems to protect the tardigrades from radiation. You know how they figured this out? What else do you do? Giant sunglasses. You irradiated some tardigrades? Not tardigrades. Humans. They took the gene out of the tardigrade DNA, and they stuck it into the DNA of human cells in a dish. And they irradiated the human cells in the dish. And lo and behold, they decreased the damage to the DNA from x-rays induced, from x-rays by 40%. So it improved what they call radio tolerance, or tolerance to radiation, radio waves, the radiation they were exposed to, and also reduced damage. So this could be a new mechanism that we'll find in our genetically modified future offspring who do want to go to space. No, I am playing with that idea that that's science fiction. That's not really happening, everybody. Well, you know what they say about science fiction. Soon it becomes science fact eventually. Yeah. And so this is pretty exciting, the fact that there is this gene that now we have a direction to go to find out why or how this gene confers protection. What is it about this gene that allows it to maintain the integrity of DNA? And so now we can look at it. We know that when put into human cells, it doesn't kill the human cells, and it confers protection. So there's already two wins in the book for this particular gene. It's true. It doesn't really matter if you protect it from radiation if it kills the cells. Right? You don't want to stick it into a cell, and then what does it do there? You have to find out what it does in the cells. And damage a cell. Is it going to kill it? Yeah, no, it didn't. That's fantastic. Thanks, tardigrades. Thanks. Based on your DNA, we know how to genetically engineer future astronauts for deep space travel. Perfect. Exactly. Yeah. I think it's a promising direction. But then again, that's me. Other people might have issues. Speaking of going to outer space, we have earthquakes here on Earth, right? Well, Mars also has Marsquakes, not earthquakes. Marsquakes. This is from tectonic activity. And while the Earth is still very tectonically active, which means we've got these plates slip slide in around on the crust of the planet, Mars' activity has really slowed down a lot. There's a lot of the volcanic activity under the surface is much subdued from where it once was, but it still has this activity from the grinding together of rocks as a result of earthquakes. Researchers here on Earth have discovered that rocks here on Earth, a lot of rocks contain a lot of hydrogen. And when they get ground together, when the forces of the Earth at active fault lines grind the rocks together, a lot of hydrogen gets released. Bacteria can survive on released hydrogen. And they are suggesting in the journal Astrobiology that Mars might have sufficient geologic activity to smash rocks together and produce enough hydrogen to support bacterial populations around fault zones. Bum, bum, bum. So what they'd like to do is examine rocks and minerals formed underground around faults and fractures. And there are already plans from NASA with NASA to measure seismic activity on Mars with its 2018 INSITE mission. And so that data could provide interesting support to this argument. Potentially. We'll see. Anyway, bacteria, maybe. And if not today, then maybe once upon a time, when there was more activity, maybe it would have been even more likely. And then finally, my final space story for today. This is one that researchers think could really pose a lot of physics into question. So in the 1970s, some researchers discovered that spiral galaxies, like our own Milky Way, rotate at a nearly constant speed. So you have the velocity of stars and the visible gas that you see in a galaxy. And it doesn't decrease with radiation. It doesn't decrease with radius. Sorry, wrong R word. Now, some new researchers at Case Western Reserve University have found an interesting new relationship in spiral galaxies like those galaxies and also irregular galaxies. They have found that the acceleration that we observe in the rotation curves as they're spinning around correlates with the gravitational acceleration expected only from the visible mass. So normal baryonic matter. Now, this throws things into question because the previous work suggested that dark matter, it gave a little bit more credence to the idea that galaxies might be surrounded by a halo of dark matter. And that dark matter was what contributed to the spin rate of these spiral galaxies with these flat rotation curves. But now, this relationship, they have looked at a bunch of galaxies and they found it's consistent among 153 spiral and irregular galaxies. And these range in size from very small dwarfs to giants. And they're not flat all-flat galaxies either. They have massive central bulges, some of them, and some are very flat. And it's consistent whether or not there are a lot of stars or a lot of gas or an even mix. So this is crazy, right? So this means the spin of a galaxy, directly proportional to the amount of visible mass that we can see. Yes. However, the fact that it stays together still requires a massive dark matter to be keeping it together, although the spin seems just to correlate to what we can already see. Right, so exactly. The dark matter is therefore not contributing to the acceleration of the way that it rotates. The dark matter is not contributing. So is it even there? That is the new question, yes. Yes. Yeah, so. Been a while since I've had a hit. This would be a great one if there's no such thing as dark matter, it would be fantastic. This is one of those findings. And this is not something that's, oh, people just came up with this. No, they've been working on this for 10 years. And a lot of their data was collected with the NASA-Spitzer Space Telescope during the last five years to get near-infrared images and to get reliable measurements of the matter, the mass in the galaxies. So they say the researchers, or actually this is a quote from someone who's not involved, David Merritt from the Rockchester Institute of Technology says, the relation discovered by McGaw and colleagues is a serious and possibly fatal challenge to the hypothesis of galaxies being surrounded by dark matter. Since it shows that rotation curves are precisely determined by the distribution of normal matter alone, nothing in the standard cosmological model predicts this. And it's almost impossible to imagine how that model could be modified to explain it without discarding the dark matter hypothesis completely. But then you still have to figure out why the galaxy doesn't fly apart. That's right. Strap it all and start over. I don't know. Getting close, getting closer. There's good stuff here. We're close. Lots of good stuff. But I would love dark matter, by the way. That would be awesome. Yeah, so now it's mass. It's also gravity. So now McGaw, one of the lead researcher on this, says, in our case, we find a relationship between what you see in normal matter in galaxies and what you get in their gravity. This is important because it is telling us something fundamental about how galaxies work. But the thing is, this is my interpretation, they don't know what that fundamental thing is yet. And this is what it comes down to. If I can just explain it for a moment. We don't know what gravity is. This is, as much as the word is used and explains so many Newtonian things, we really don't know why. We know there's relationships between mass and energy and speed and velocities and all these things. But we don't know why. Yeah, I love people who are like, oh, there's a graviton. It's obviously a particle. And I'm like, well, you haven't found it yet. We have not found it. We don't really know what it just is. It doesn't work in every scenario. This is the most, and it's the most fundamental thing. And I've talked about this a little bit before. Like you look at the ancient gods throughout any culture. And you get the god of the East Wind and the West Wind. You got gods that look over sheep. You get gods in charge of love and the human heart and human fates. There's war gods. There's this god. There's that god. There's the god for comfortable loafers. Got gods for everything. There is never mentioned a god of gravity. And why? It's because it's considered such a fundamental just assumed thing. Up is up. Down is down. That's the way that it works. We don't know that we don't experience a change in it. And all the gods were formed out of things that you see change in. The wind was coming this way. Now it's going that way. The sea was tepid. And now it's ferocious. Whenever you saw a change, there was an unknown force behind it that was moving it. But gravity was always just gravity. This stuff goes down when you drop it. That's it. There was no change in it. So I don't know where it was coming from. Oh, yeah, for such a fundamental thing that humanity just took for granted for so long to have gone this far with science and still not know why up is up and down is down other than it has relations to mass and it has correlative things going on. But we don't know why. Yeah, so we don't. So this work reduces uncertainty in the mass, in the normal matter, in these galaxies that they've looked at. And it has this irregularity. And any theory that physics is working on has to kind of fit this in somehow. And maybe we'll move forward and it'll be a simple explanation. But yeah, who knows how the dark matter, how does the dark matter fit in? We still haven't really found that. This is going to be a brilliant point in future human science history, where they look back and go, the age of overthinking. Very possibly. We're going to go, oh, actually simple. You just have to have exhausted every other possibility before you came to the conclusion that up is up and down is down. It's really that simple. That's all there is to it. That's all there is to it. All right, this is this week in Science. Justin, what you got? Oh, I have got in the Caribbean, the playground of pirates are. The Caribbean, there is an island murder mystery that is now over 400 years old. Mystery creature that is reported to have lived on the islands up until the time of the Spanish invasion, the 16th century. It was not described by the Spanish. And they may not have even known it was there or may have misidentified it as a large rat. So mysterious was this island murder that no one witnessed it. And murdered was, or an extinction anyway, likely brought on by the influx of rats, who likely did not intend to be at sea for very many months and were likely exploding in population, being back on land again. So we all know about the mysterious. All we knew about the mysterious creature was basically it amounted to a pile of owl pellets. But we know about this now. Which is exactly where we found our answer. And in a pile of 750 year old owl pellets, skeletal remains among these ancient owl pellets anyway. And from these skeletal remains, a team of scientists recovered DNA of the West Indian mammal Nesophantes. Meaning, island murder. With this, they traced its evolutionary history back to the dawn of mammals 70 million years ago. The authors including Selina Brace, Jessica Thomas and Ian Barnes published her findings in the Advanced Online Edition of Molecular Biology and Evolution. They used the 750 year old specimen to generate many thousands of base pairs of DNA sequence data. This allowed the research team to uncover its evolutionary origins and finally resolve the relationship between its closest relatives, the insectivores, a group of, a group including shrews, hedgehogs and moles. Phylogenetic and divergence time scenarios clearly demonstrate Nesophantes or island murder to be a truly, fully distinct sister group to another group of living native Caribbean insectivores, the Solonadons. So, do you know what a Solonadon is? Yeah, they're adorable. Right? They look like shrews with very long, pointy noses. Yeah, and they can be like a, like a pound over a pound. They can, like, they're a pretty decent size, right? So, the time split they figure between these two correlates with an era when the northern Caribbean was formed of volcanic islands. And this is pre origins of the peaceful islands we see now today. Quoty voice. We, once we dealt with the tiny size of the bone samples, the highly degraded state of the DNA and the lack of any similar genomes to compare them to, the analysis was a piece of cake. Said Dr. Selina Brace Snarkley. He's a scientist of the Natural History Museum. The findings will be of considerable interest to me. Snarkley. It's good. Oh, look, there's a, oh, you got the thing up there. Look at that adorable little Solonadon. Big long sight. So like, they don't describe this creature, the Spanish don't, but they might have thought it was just an insanely giant rat. I was picturing a Chupacara. But that's just, that was me, you know, just hoping against hope. Island murder, Nessa Fontes, was just one of dozens of mammals that went extinct in the Caribbean during recent times as Professor Ian Barnes, research leader at London's Natural History Museum. So that's all we know so far. But Solonadons, which we do know a little bit more about, are nocturnal, burying, insectivorous mammals that are almost unique in their use of venomous saliva. And I wonder why you would need a venomous saliva if you primarily go after insects. It seems like you could just chew them. But they had some use for it, I'm sure. A little bit of a use, I don't know. Yes. And it's, even the Solonadons aren't really that well known. I mean, there's something like in Cuba, they've captured like 38 of them, like ever. And the last one was 15, 16, 17 years ago, something like that. Like they were thought to be extinct and then they found one. And then that might be the last one that we ever see again. So this is, these are pretty mysterious creatures, even when surrounded by populations of humans. Hopefully it's just hiding. Well, they burrow, but they can also climb. They can, they have pretty good use of any territory that they're in. Very rodent-ish, like a rat. Very rodent, yes. Opportunist. A true rat. Yeah. Living a burrow, living a tree. Yeah. And also, because this is another one of those cases of an isolated species, even the Solonadons. I was saying, island mammal for really, really long time. Good example of where we came from, because at some point we are all a little bit shrew-like. Yeah, for many, many years, it was just little marsupial shrew-like things living underground, while dinosaurs were having their heyday. All right, well, that was fun with the shrews and the space and stuff, but do you know what time it is now? What time is it? I do, I do, I do. It's one of my favorite parts of the show. What is it? Dustin, what is it? It's time for Pleasantimal Corner. She loves our creature. Great as well. Bired pig, little pig, no pet at all. Wanna hear about a animal? She's your girl. Except for giant pandas as well. That are no longer. What you got, Blair? I have very smart pigeons. So let's talk about some bird braids, particularly some pigeons. We often think about pigeons as being pretty darn gross, and oftentimes I would agree with you, but they also can be pretty smart, which we've talked about on this show before. I think people just have that negative connotation who live in cities. Yeah, and I live in cities and there are gross pigeons. I've never thought. Pigeons are so cute. They have that iridescent sheen on their feathers. So why is the pigeon gross? Who thinks of it in a coop? They're so cute. People release them at weddings? Those are the white ones. Yeah, those are called doves. Like a white winged dove. It's still a pigeon. Anyway, let's talk about bird braids. Let's talk about a study that was recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that looked at, from the University of Otoga, New Zealand, they looked at some pigeons and they trained them on touch screens to recognize English words. So they would flash words like down or game and then they would flash non-words, like twore or kneld. And each time there was a word and a star symbol and the pigeons were trained to identify actual words pecking the word if it was real or if it was a nonsense word like kneld, then you would pack the star symbol. And they learned about 58 words and about 8,000 non-words. So this is a good starting point. And then the researchers started flashing new words that they had never seen before on the screen. And pigeons correctly identified the new words as words that are rate significantly, mathematically significantly above chance. So they learned some kind of pattern. They learned how to recognize English words. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Pigeons can read? No. Wait, no, no. This is the way I'm taking away. Pigeons can be taught to read. No. How else might this data be interpreted? They, I'm so glad you asked. As far as they can tell, again, the University of Otago's Department of Psychology and the lead researcher, Dr. Damien Scarf, kind of figured out that the way the pigeons performed this feat was by looking at the statistical likelihood that certain by-grams were more likely associated with words or non-words. By-grams are letter pairs that often show up together. E-N or A-L are common by-grams that are related to real English words. Other by-grams? Like, I would, like the non-word that they used that you mentioned, kneld. Neld. That sounds like a real word. Neld is a real word. A word, I think maybe they, the pigeons were learning some kind of general rule of thumb, but yeah, they're not reading, but they're not reading. But they're learning a rule of thumb about these visual symbols that they're looking at and whether or not the symbols are in the appropriate order to get a reward. Right. My rule of thumb though is to largely disregard psychologists' use of mathematics or statistics. And I'm sorry, it's just- That actually is related to what I was gonna say, is that it's not that the pigeons are picking out the correct words all the time. They are picking the words more often than they should be able to by chance. Yes, exactly. So it's not chance. That's why I'm saying they're using a rule of thumb. There's something they learned. They're still getting it wrong a lot though. I almost, here's the thing I would, and here's, and we've talked about this a bunch in the show before, but this is the story that makes it into the press. How many pigeons, squirrels, rabbits have been given a similar sort of scenario and statistically didn't produce a result. And therefore, we don't hear about the failures. Great question, Justin. You're on fire tonight with your questions. Wow. Look at that. So they have done this study with lots of different types of animals. Mostly things like apes or lesser primates have succeeded at this job, but they, so far, anything that is not an ape or a primate has not been able to get this done. So this is the first time they've seen this in something that isn't extremely closely related to humans, so. However, however, to be fair, the snail study is still ongoing. That one's taking a lot longer to get the data. To reach the touch screen. It's just. There. So I actually. Crying. It's. It's going back the other way. So real quick, you guessed your pots. I want to talk about what the science actually means here. So again, the pigeons aren't reading. They don't know the words that they're looking at. What we do know is that they are also recognizing the most commonly appearing by grams in English. So it's all based on patterns. If they see these same two words showing up together in the 58 words that they learned, the two letters, excuse me, then if they see those by grams together, two by grams together that they've seen before in words that they learned, they can put literally two and two together. And recognize that as a real word. So they're not reading, but they are learning based on information that they have been taught through being trained to recognize real words. And the really interesting part about this is that pigeons don't read, primates don't read, or lesser primates don't read, even apes don't read. We're the only apes that read English words. So the fact that these birds can figure out this categorization means there is some scaffolding around in the brain allowing for this to happen, even though these animals aren't scratching out, they're not doing cave paintings, they're not doing anything that you should be able to recognize visually as patterns in terms of language or communication. So what they think is going on is neuronal recycling. So they're taking brain cells that are once devoted to spotting everyday objects like rocks, trees, visual cues, and they're using these neurons to be used to recognize letters as shapes that mean something. Because they represent a food reward if responded to appropriately. And so it's a very important stimulus for survival. Yeah, I don't... Most humans can't read these words. Right. Most of them, right. I do think they could have picked an easier language. Right, but I think the use of the term neuronal recycling is not accurate either because it's not like this is their brand new use and they're not gonna do anything else. These neurons are just capable of responding to particular types of neuronal or visual stimuli. That's it. So there's a signal from the eyes that is salient for receiving food. And so you have two systems of the brain probably triggering these neurons to respond in this particular way. And they would respond that way if it were a tree or if it were a picture of a tree or if it's this word system, this letter system that they showed them, it's visual. And so the real term is exaptation, that is the actual scientific term. It doesn't mean recycling, but it is not an adaptation, which is a new use. You're adapting something, but an exaptation, which is that you're taking something that's already there and using its abilities to do something just slightly for just a slightly different function. But it's really not a different function. I think we're putting human value on it. That's such a good point. And I completely agree. I think that this is one of those cases of anthropomorphism where you see the animal recognizing letters and you say like in this press release, it says that they are taking something to use it, something that 300 million years ago was came about can be co-opted to perform a human function. But it's not doing a human function because they're not reading. They're doing exactly what they're supposed to do with that part of their brain. They're just doing it with stimuli that they wouldn't come across in the wild. And that maybe if they were just a little smarter, maybe they could learn to read. I thought you were gonna say that. Because maybe our ability to read comes from an exaptation. Yes, exactly. And that's really what they're trying to say, but they said it in a very human-centric way, which I'm so glad that you did bring that up, is that that's exactly what it is. Both of you guys just killing it today. So yes, I just bring the stories. You make it all work. Yeah, so that's exactly it. Maybe we could teach pigeons how to read if it benefited them. If it benefited them. And you know, we've been keeping pigeons for a really long time. Maybe all that newspaper at the bottom of the cages. Well, I was thinking more that the carrier pigeons were reading my letters, my private letters. It's a long flight, you know. What is it? Why am I bringing this? Why is she writing to this guy? Stay over in the jet. Yeah, anyway, on a less pleasurable topic, mosquitoes and malaria. I know, not the greatest. So mosquitoes, depending on the species and the subspecies, some of them have a preference for biting humans and others have a preference for biting animals. And a new study out of the University of California, Davis. Davis. Davis. Shout out to Davis. They found that the preference for cattle from malaria transmitting mosquitoes can be, it looks like it is due to a chromosome anomaly. So it looks like these mosquitoes that normally transmit human malaria that have been found biting cows are carrying this chromosomal rearrangement in the major East African malaria vector. And so by identifying specific genes that affect this trait, there's some potential to stop the spread or slow the spread of malaria. I've never heard of cows with malaria. Yeah, so cows don't get human malaria. All right, so as long as mosquitoes are biting cows, even if they have malaria, no problemo. Yeah, so it is an idea. I think that we should just work on killing them or castrating them. I know we've talked on the show about- How will castrating cattle make any difference to mosquitoes? No, the mosquitoes. So we've talked before on the show about finding a genetic abnormality that has caused them to not be able to reproduce or not be able to find each other to reproduce or not be able to lay eggs, all these different things. That I think is the long-term, that makes more sense to me. I'm not sure that, especially because in so many places in Africa, people live so close to their cattle that that is something that I did a little research and I found that back in 2014, there was a study looking at making cologne for cows to make them smell like humans so that mosquitoes would bite them instead of us. So this is kind of an adjacent study. This is a pretty similar idea and it was funded by the Gates Foundation and they found that overall, the study groups that lived near cows or goats didn't have a lower malaria rate because of the proximity still. Yeah, and so part of this too sounds to me like a really bad idea. Like, yes, it could work for a little while. You inject or you somehow manipulate to increase the population that has this chromosome differentiation that makes them more prone to go after a cow than a human because the little swing into the tail is not enough to keep them from getting bit. We have a much better chance of defending ourselves and so then you have this buffet of cows and cattle across the planet that this vector has free rain to now that they're attracted to it and sure, they're not getting malaria but it's still there and therefore eventually a modification in that chromosome or just a change in the population and suddenly we have this ginormous population of mosquitoes that haven't been bugging people for a while but now that they are, they're doing so en masse. Right, and so part of it also is the proximity of humans to cattle and additionally, if it is a wonderful buffet of cattle then that obviously means that the population will flourish if we're not trying to reduce the numbers but just allowing them to feed on cattle. And what's more, it's like you can imagine the evolutionary implications of going after something with thicker skin for a really long time and then coming back to humans. Who knows if they would come back to humans? Who knows if that would become a preference again? We don't know that and my argument against getting rid of all mosquitoes is that they are an important part of the ecosystem, they support the diets of bats, they support the diets of birds, they support the diets of spiders. Mosquitoes are actually an intricate part of the ecosystem and getting rid of them will have downstream effects. It's not something, I don't think it's something that we can just do, reducing numbers, absolutely, reducing propensity for biting humans, absolutely. It's also about making sure that water storage facilities in these areas are covered and clean so that mosquitoes don't breed in them. There's lots of things you can do to reduce mosquito numbers and reduce transmission of malaria that does not involve genetically modifying mosquitoes. I also wonder about the potential of spreading unintentionally, causing some sort of butterfly effect where you spread diseases between cows accidentally by increasing the amount of these mosquitoes bouncing around back and forth. There's always, whenever you do something like this, it always makes me nervous that there's some unintended consequence when you upset an ecosystem in this way. It's a pretty big difference. There's the girl who wants to get rid of all the mosquitoes. That was a joke. Although I agree with you. No, I actually agree with you because lately, for whatever reason, because the wetlands are up again, they're getting ready for the migration of the birds, the wetlands have been flooded out here, there's mosquitoes everywhere. Or we could just genetically modify ourselves to exude deat. All right. That sounds like, let's modify ourselves. That sounds like a better plan. Yeah, or we could wear flea collars, but they're mosquito repellent. Deat collars. Yeah. I think, and I'm pretty sure, and I'm gonna quote the study that I've never read or heard of just for my own defense for a second and say that I think I've heard that if we got rid of all the mosquitoes, it would be minimal impact. It wouldn't be bad. We've reported that on the show before, but there've also been other reports about the ecosystem services that they provide. So once again, messing with an ecosystem in that way by taking out or adding in animals or changing their food source, you never know what's gonna happen. Everybody might agree on that. Just about every, I mean, this is the one who's like. Well, until you take away the mosquitoes, you take away the bats and then all sorts of food that you eat no longer exists because it's not getting pollinated. All right, everybody out there. Everybody out there. We could keep debating this forever and the show's not gonna go anywhere. Everyone out there, let us know on Twitter at Twist Science. If you're in our chat room, let us know right now. What do you think? Should we genetically modify the mosquitoes to prefer cows? Or should we just get rid of the mosquitoes? What do you think? I'd love to hear from you. And that does it for this first half of This Week in Science. Thanks for those great stories. Blair and Justin, Justin's already taken the break. We will be taking a break right now. For just a couple of moments, please stay tuned while we talk to you for a little bit longer. We're gonna keep talking to you. That's what I do. But when we come back, we've got dinosaurs, sentences in Africa, and more. So stay tuned. You don't wanna miss a thing, do you? But it's a hot car for solicitation, it's all the only free time. We are the pair of goggles, and we're looking for the things I could and see. Hey, everyone out there. Thank you so much for listening to This Week in Science. Thank you for joining us for another episode. 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Now due to the juices and pills and the creams, the body's lost toxins, whatever that means. Stop eating all of that sinister food. You're in a day's awful, so it's gotta be good. Still, you're a skeptic again. I can't believe you believe in that show. We disagree, but I'll say it's good to give it down. We are a verification of truth marks from holy magic. Leaves me slightly queasy deep down in the aftermath. But that's the life that believed me. Not yet, but almost now. They drive to the bookstore and blindly start trusting through the miracles and cures all laid down in black ink. Never even bothering to stop and think. The only real power that I do believe is the dollars and cents all these authors receive. And now, now we are back with more This Week in Science. We are back with more This Week in Science. Thanks for joining us again. Hey, Justin, what you got? I have got a story for you. So we often think of dinosaurs as rather large, sometimes fiercely looking creatures that are either too big or too ferocious to need to hide from anything. They're just out there. I'm a dinosaur. Rawr! And they have to hide from other dinosaurs. Right, and the edge of the dinosaurs, not all dinosaurs were that big or that ferocious and yet lived amongst big ferocious creatures that it would have done well to hide from. And so scientists managed to reconstruct the color patterns of a well-preserved dinosaur from China and found that the species pistachios, pistachosaurus, forget it. It's also known as the Parrot Lizard. There you go. Because it has a parrot-like beak, right? And found that the, yeah, this Parrot Lizard was lighter on its underside and darker on the top. This color pattern known as countershading is a common form of camouflage in modern animals. Findings led researchers to conclude that pistachiosaurus... Citicosaurus. Parrot Lizard. Citicosaurus. Like, Citicosaurus. Like, Citicosaurus. The P is the same as P. Yes, that's how you say it. That's the family, the parrots are in Citicines. So, Citicosaurus. Right. Okay, cool. So, Citicosaurus most likely lived in an environment with diffuse light because of this coloring, suggesting that it lived in a forest of some sort. Fossil preserves clear countershading, which has been shown to function by counterlumining shadows on a body, thus making an animal pure optically flat to the eye of the beholder, says Yacob Vinter University of Bristol, United Kingdom. By reconstructing a life-size 3D model, they were able not only to see how the patterns of shading changed over the body, but also that it matched the sort of camouflage which would work best in forested environments, added Ines Couto of the University of Bristol as well. Countershading most likely served to protect the parrot lizard against predators that use patterns of shadow on an object to determine shape just as us human type people do. Graduate student to Yale, Vinter realized that structures previously thought to be artifacts or dead bacteria and fossilized feathers were actually melanosomes, small structures that carry melanopigments found in feathers and skin of many animals today. In some well-preserved specimens, such as the parrot lizard, they could make out those patterns of preserved melanin without even using a microscope. They could just see them with their own eyes. So there's no, but it was still no easy matter to apply the same principles to an extinct animal that had been crushed, flat, fossilized. And oh, Kiki has posted up a nice picture. Kiki, say something. Hi. This is, I love this. This is the 3D model that they made. That's pretty sweet. So it looks kind of like, I think it's so funny because it looks like a parrot fish in the face. So if you ever seen a parrot fish, it's called a parrot fish because it has kind of this beaky face. But it doesn't look like a parrot really. So I feel like this is a- What's got horns coming out the sides of its face? This is also a little odd. But so the parrot fish doesn't look like a parrot, but I understand why it's called a parrot fish. I feel like this dinosaur looks like a parrot fish, not like a parrot. It's got these strange horns coming out of it, like jaws or something. It's cheek horns. Yeah, it's very odd. They say they were amazed to see how well the color palanquin's actually worked the camouflage of the dinosaur. And they described it as both weird and cute, horns on either side of its head and long bristles on its tail. Lived in an early cretaceous of China and has been found in the same rock strata where many feather dinosaurs have been found. Those deposits also include evidence of a forest environment based on plant and wood fossils. But Winther says closely-rated species also lived in Mongolia, an environment that would have resembled at the time a savanna with much less vegetation. So researchers predict that they would have different camouflaged patterns, although they don't have evidence of this as of yet. Not yet. Yeah. That's great. How cool. I can't wait until we actually figure out more exactly what they looked like because I feel like growing up, dinosaurs were always green or blue or brown, and that was pretty much it. Occasionally a red one maybe. But having a better idea of their patterns and their coloration, I think they'll be fascinating. It'll be kids will grow up in a completely different world where they can be fascinated by dinosaurs that actually look a lot like they looked. I mean, dinosaurs are fascinating to begin with, and yeah, to have a little bit more visual accuracy will be, it's gonna be wonderful. I mean, this to me, I find interesting, many, we've had skin scale, fur, feather colorations. I mean, feathers came later, fur came later with different organisms, but the skin, I mean, that's been a covering for millions of years, going back before the dinosaurs, probably when it was giant fish-like creatures in the water. They had skins as well, and I'm going to bet that one of the earliest things to arise was skin is for protection, right? So you have color, melanin to allow protection from sun and UV rays, especially once we got onto land or for those aquatic organisms that were very shallow in the water. And then you're gonna have differential shading for camouflage so that organisms can, you'd be darker on the top and lighter underneath so that if you, say, are in an aquatic environment, you're going to be looked up to and seen maybe as more of just the sky above, because for an organism that has primitive eyes and is looking for changes in light and dark, if you don't give off much of a difference to the light and dark, that's gonna be good for your survival. Right, and it's also put out there that if you're in the sunny area, then you look more uniform because you're lighter underside, which is in shadow, and you're darker upper side, which is in the sun, sort of becomes more uniform, but it seems to me this is an accident. This camouflage is an accident of selection and not, you know, of what it looks like today. But Justin, we love fish, we have this colorate. No, no, no, but here's my point though. You require more of that melanin up top because that's where the sun hits you and you don't require it on your underbelly because the sun don't shine there and that's more likely how this came about. It's where it started probably, yeah. After is sort of an accident of the body, the skin trying to protect itself from the sun and the fact that it may have these flattening effects or this sort of counter-shading effects and that those species have survived so well is what natural selection is about. It could be a good evolutionary pathway. I think it's a good, yeah, I think it's a good natural selection and that's something the bird is doing. There's looking a little bit skeptical. Yeah, I'm having trouble with this because most fish have it and fish that are pretty far down where UV is not that big of a problem. Most birds, most predatory birds have it, which is clearly a visual thing. It's hard for me to believe that all of that convergent evolution is an accident. I don't mean that it's an accident. I mean that effect is caused by exposure to the sun but it persists because it's also... And it becomes more fine-tuned, right? Because it's an advantage, yeah. But would you say it in feathers? If you also look at it something like... Gosh, I'm thinking of like a... What is it? Stingray, right? The rays. The rays, for a good portion, will be in very shallow waters, right? This isn't a deep-sea thing. Rays tend to be in shallow waters where they've got blasting sun from above and their undersides are shaded. Now they're not so much worried about the... I doubt the pressure was so much that you have prey below you, not being able to see you, as well as prey above you being hidden. That would be part of it that would come after also needing to protect yourself from the sun in your shallow water and not needing it underneath. Then why don't skates have countershading that hide under the sand? Because they hide under the sand. They're not fully covered in sand. They can still be affected by the sun's rays, but they don't need countershading, and they don't have it. They don't have countershading, right? But they do have melanin and shading. Right, and the pressure of natural selection, therefore, wasn't that important. And I'm saying it. We're talking about the two different things. The origination of this versus why it's persisted across species that may not need it. And may have led to different instances of convergent evolution. So you wouldn't say that this dinosaur was hiding. You're indicating that animals that don't have color shading, countershading, don't have it because they didn't need it, and not that animals that have countershading have it because they need it. That's what, and I feel like that is highly unlikely based on if you look at the animals that have it versus the animals that don't, it's definitely something that has originated over and over and over again, and it's not the baseline. It's not the baseline. Like this dinosaur isn't worried about pretty much. Countershading is not the baseline, no. Yeah, that's, yeah. I don't think countershading is the baseline. Right, and so if it originated based on the need to shelter from sun, that's something that all animals would have as the baseline. But if it's something. I can no longer honestly tell if we're agreeing or disagreeing. We're disagreeing, but that's okay. We can move on. I think it is. I think you might actually be saying similar things here, but we are going to move on now because this has gone on, and I'm gonna have to edit it out of the radio show. And I should probably edit it out of the podcast too, because people are like, what are you talking about? Yeah. Why are you finishing my sentences, Justin? Why are you finishing my sentences? Why are you doing it? You're saying which one? My sandwich is, no, my sentence is. Okay, so everybody knows about this propensity to finish people's sentences. Sometimes people that you don't know very well, you just know what they're gonna say. Sometimes people you know more often than not people you know very well, you do know what they're going to say in particular instances. How does this happen? What is going on in the brain? Well, research has shown time and again that our brain is actively predicting what people are going to say. Okay, so based on our experiences and our memory of things, conversations that we've had, when we listen to somebody else, our brain is doing this, okay, what are they saying? Are they saying, I've heard this before. I've heard this, oh, are they saying something new? Am I learning something? And it's constantly being compared. And so you're always a split second ahead of what people are actually saying inside your head even though your comprehension is maybe sometimes lagging behind. So that said, I have no idea what you're about to say next. Ah, fantastic. Pretty much studies of language in the brain and memory in the brain, even though now we've got this evidence that memory is, we know that memory is essential for our understanding of language. The study of the two things has been pretty much separate. So we've had, we've broke this area here and we've got all these language centers. But nobody really talks about the hippocampus much. And the hippocampus is kind of like the control center for memories. It helps to lay down new memories and it also helps to activate related memories as things are happening in your experience so that we can make associations with stuff. And so these researchers at the University of California Berkeley did a new experiment in which they recorded, they actually stuck electrodes into the hippocampuses of 12 people recording from neurons in the hippocampuses as the people heard fill in the blank sentences. So basically people were doing mad libs during open brain surgery. This is awesome. I love this study. Pass. So they had questions that were considered to have a, were considered to be constrained in which your experience and the answer or the blank, the space, the word that's left blank really only has one answer. If you hear the sentence, he swept the floor with a knife. You have some odd experiences, but the majority of people are going to think broom. So they're recording and then as the sentences were being heard at the point in time that the blank space was in the sentence, they would show a picture of what the answer was supposed to be. So in, he swept a floor with a, at that gap, there would be an image of a broom that showed up in front of the people on a screen. So, and they found that the hippocampus showed highly synchronized activity as the brain honed in on the answer before the answer was displayed. So before that blank, the hippocampus was already synchronizing neural activity into what's called a theta rhythm. And the theta rhythm occurs at about one to four cycles per second. And this is a rhythm in which neurons that represent associated memories vibrate at, or activate at where their electrical activity, their action potentials are cycling that, you know, at that theta rhythm. One, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, something like that. Anyhow, unconstrained sentences would be the kinds of sentences that you don't really necessarily have an answer for. So, many possible answers could be considered for, she came in here with the, what did she come in here with? It could have been anything. The zebra finch, right? The electrodes. And so when the unconstrained sentences were played or heard, there was not as much synchronization with the neurons in the hippocampal region. And so the researchers say that basically they've showed that when you record directly from the human hippocampal region, as a sentence becomes more constraining, the hippocampus becomes more active, basically predicting what is going to happen. The hippocampus started building up rhythmic theta activity that is linked to memory access and processing. And so the study shows, according to this researcher, that memory contributes as a sentence is evolving in time and memory is a real-time part of our language system and not a slave to the language system. Interesting. So the cool thing here, real-time recording from neurons enabled them to get this fine-tuned understanding of what was happening in the hippocampus during language comprehension. Those graduate students that must be so hard up for cash. No, it's not graduate students undergoing brain surgery. These were epilepsy patients and they were already undergoing surgery to destroy a part of their brain so that they would no longer have epileptic seizures. So half of the hippocampus, I believe, gets destroyed during the surgery. The other half in the other hemisphere is the hemisphere that was recorded from in the experiment. That's great. Winner's all around. So these are people undergoing surgery who volunteered, said, oh, my brain's open anyway, let's do it. This must be the same group. I do have to pull the few stories out of, this must be a crowded room. The surgery's taking place because I feel like I've at least taken a few stories in the past from this same group. So that's one crowded surgery room. Lots of people taking notes. There are a few epilepsy patients in the world and there are a couple of labs doing stuff like this. It's not just one surgery room. But I bet nobody's paying for the surgery anymore. Seems like there's gotta be, you know what I mean? There's gotta be enough reason to be. Am I gonna get a discount on this? Oh yeah. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. What's my coupon code? Chair. Brain surgery. Justin, you got another story? Oh, sure. Why not? I'll make one up. Here we go. No. This is a study of hundreds of new genomes from across the globe yielded insights into modern genetic diversity and ancient population dynamics. Back and about. Confirming that essentially all non-Africans today descended from a single migration out of Africa. Back to out of Africa, are we? Back to out of Africa again, only this time only once because we've been talking about this for a while and there was been talked about for a long time, multiple. And now we're not including Neanderthals and Denysovians in this. We're just talking about the modernish human peoples. So most of the population, the sort of genome wide population studies have been done on big populations. This study instead sequence samples from 142 smaller populations, most of which had previously been understudied. David Reich, professor of genetics, it's HMS and senior author of the study says, if we want to understand who we really are, we have to realize that some of the most interesting aspects of human variation are only present in underrepresented small populations. So we wanted to go out into the world. This is a second quote from somebody else. We wanted to go out into the world and pull together as many of the ethnically, linguistically and anthropologically diverse samples as we possibly could, said Swapan Malik, bioinformatics systems director in the Reich lab and first author of the study. Of course, he goes on, there are thousands of ethnically distinct populations around the world, much more work needs to be done. Reich Malik and others in the international team and colleagues began by selecting two genomes from each from 51 populations represented in the collection called the Human Genome Diversity Project. Next, they assembled samples for members of 91 other groups including diverse Native Americans, South Asian African populations who had not previously been included in genome wide studies and sent the DNA for sequencing. And all the project analyzed the genomes of only 300 people, but from these 91 groups. Key conclusion, vast majority of modern human ancestry and non-Africans derives from a single population that migrated out of Africa. This is also being supported by two other whole genome sequencing studies that are also appearing in the drone nature, the magazine nature. Once led by, one of these studies was an Estonian group focused on 379 whole genome sequences. The other was a Danish group that analyzed 108 Australian New Guineans. New Guineans. Together, the three studies put to rest a lingering question about whether the indigenous peoples of Australia, New Guinea and the Ottoman islands descended in large part from a second group which would have been the first group because they left Africa earlier than the main group and skirted the coast of the Indian Ocean. This has been widely held belief. I think we've talked about this before. Turns out, nope, same group. This is, they originate from the same one Exodus group that became Europeans, Native Americans, Asians, all of this, right? Together, okay, so. It's awesome. What's sort of interesting about this though is that it says our best estimate for the proportion of ancestry from an early exit population is zero. With the wiggle room, they say for at most, maybe 2%. Maybe there was stragglers, early arrivers. Not, however, it does indicate that the population of Australia didn't linger in the Middle East, but actually headed straight to Australia and popping to Guinea. These populations are actually more diverse from each other genetically than say Europeans from Siberians or Asians because they arrived there directly and once getting there, they were largely isolated populations. They didn't interact for tens of thousands of years where we, the rest of us early or first wave, only wave out of Africans, mingled quite a bit before becoming and slowly, you know, sort of separating over time. They got there quick and stayed sort of distinct and so those genetic populations became more and more distinct from each other. Yeah, so while diverse, they're also saying representing some of the most, the longest, it's hard to say this in the right way. These are, the Australian and Papua New Genians are some of the longest living traceable tracts of human DNA, right? So these are the most, it's not necessarily unchanged, but least influenced by other groups in intermingling that exists today. Doesn't mean that they're the most, like those that first left necessarily, but it does mean that they are the most, have the most distinct ancestry from the rest of us. The rest of our ancestry is very hard to say that, you know, that there've been, whether you're a year, if you're a European, you can basically claim like 5,000 years, right? Of this was being a European, maybe. And then which type of European and which influx of this population of that population has affected that? Whereas there's groups that can say tens of thousands, if not, you know, 30,000 or 40,000 years of this group sort of being distinct from the rest of the modern human populations on the planet. And so, yeah, and so they are, they have the most variation. Well, and they have, well, not just from us, from each other, this is sort of, right, like, and we've talked about this before too, this is also the case in Africa. In Africa, there are dozen or more sort of more distinct populations of DNA, whereas all of Europe and Asia and the Americas is sort of one group largely. Right, it hasn't been long enough for variation to arise. And to be distinct, yeah. And yeah, and so we have these more distinct from each other populations just in the Australias, if I can call all of, you know, and pop it again. I can't list off all the answers, but there's more distinct differentiation there than there would be from a Native American to a Scandinavian. Mm-hmm. Which is fascinating because you kind of would go there. But that's just one little area, but that's not how these things are determined. That's not how it works. That's not how it works. It's all about the DNA. And if Aboriginal is ever interacted and read with the Northern humans, and that's sort of what this is saying. No, they didn't even interact much with those who were neighbors. And you may be talking about, I think they're popping again, but I know it's, I can't remember which group. There's a group that has lighter hair in those islands. And it actually seems to have roots, you know, darker skin, but sort of blonde hair. And they may have tracked that correlation with the Denysovians, who are an extinct group that we don't really know that much about. I love the fact that what we're doing is... They have this Denysovian, which we've only thus far also discovered in Siberia. So it's, yeah. And Carl, I think, had a bit of the Denysovian. Yes, but I think it's fantastic that we're, you know, ten years ago we didn't have any of this understanding. You know, when we started doing this show, you know, when you joined the show in 2005, Justin, like, our understanding of our lineage was so much less. And the genetics, what we're able to do now is that the view is beautiful. It is great. And let's keep moving on this show. How about some micro-robotic Sily Silya? Some Korean scientists have created the first micro-robot with Silya, like a paramecium. So it's this little tiny, tiny micro-bot with all these little paddles, but they all spin. They kind of spin like paramecium's Silya work, and this is the first time anybody's gotten it to work. And it's all thanks to nanotechnology and magnets. Because the motors are actually powered by micro-magnets and then the directionality of these little robots is also managed by magnets. And there's a great video from the group that I'm going to share right now in which you can see this little tiny robot moving around on the screen, changing its direction and the way that works is a magnet is able to tell it where to go and it's able to move around on the nanoscale controlled by magnets. The cool aspects of the very accurate directional control here and the reason why having Silya is so important is that what we want to do is have nanobots, micro-robots able to populate our bloodstream, potentially be directed to tumors or areas of disease where they can deliver drugs very accurately because you don't want them swimming all over the place. You just want them to go to the place where they're needed and they deliver the drug and then either break down and get flushed out or just get out. And so paramecia and Silya have been a goal of engineers for a very long time because paramecia exists in these fluid viscous environments and the Silya are able to move the paramecia around very well. And so now we've got these little tiny micro-robots that can be moved around with magnets and very specifically in a dish at this point in time, but for sure the next step will be to see how they fare in blood vessel models or even in live animals. This is great. This is like the fantastic voyage, but we don't have to go. It is like the fantastic voyage, exactly. Right. We're not going to be shrinking ourselves down to fit inside of these bots, but the bots could maybe to go where no man has gone before. So once again, science fiction turns into science fact. A little bit of science fact, yeah. So we'll see what happens. This is a pretty awesome development when it comes to biomedicine and the idea of micro-robots. Except for the Russians will use it to assassinate people. Possibly. I don't know. This is what they do. A little ricin, a little micro-robot. Never hurt anyone. What? Let's see. Anybody have any quick stories to run down to the end? I have a quick one. What does beer and wine and cats and dogs have in common? The dog is where you threw me. I mean, my dad made a really great batch of beer once when the cat fell in it. Oh, gosh. Well, I don't know. You tell me. Beer and wine both use yeast in their fermentation process, and yeast have been domesticated. It was accidental. It was about 16th century, and ancient brewers and winemakers who didn't even understand what yeast was yet practiced what's called back-slopping, which is where you pour a little bit of the previously used dough or brew or wine into a new batch, and that actually seeds the yeast. So it starts the yeast in the new batch. That's how we make sourdough in San Francisco. It's all from the same original yeast from, in some cases, hundreds of years ago. But what they found in a recent study was that wine yeasts have similar origins to beer yeasts, but the wine yeasts show fewer signs of domestication because wine yeasts are only used to ferment grapes once a year and survive in and around the winery for the rest of the year where they interbreed with feral yeasts. And so they are more like cats, and beer yeasts are more domesticated. They are completely, quote, tame. They're completely different from feral yeasts, and they have adapted, intertwined with their relation to human yeast, or human use. So they are more like the dogs. So beer is dogs, yeast, I mean, wine is cats. Yeah. It almost makes some sense. Almost makes sense. In an unrelated way. Sit yeasty, sit. Good yeast. Domesticated yeast, oh my goodness. That's just a reason to call my next dog hops. There you go. You could do that anyway. And then teach him how to jump. There you go. Cool quantum teleportation news. Two studies out this week pretty much published back to back. One in Canada, one in China. Searchers are teleporting the quantum state of photons of light. And while the distance isn't the furthest distance ever, the Canadian experiment transported 17 photons per minute across 6.2 kilometers. So that's a real goal. Those of you who don't know, 6.2 kilometers is 6,200 meters. There we go. And the Chinese experiment transported two photons per hour across 7 kilometers. Which again, if you need the conversion, that's 7,000 meters. Exactly. Or so-ish. And the studies published in Nature Photonics, the big cool thing about it not only is it multiple photons per hour per minute in the experiments, but these were carried out on... Everyday fiber optic communications networks in cities. These were in the cities of Haifei or Hefei in China and Calgary in Canada. So this is the first time we've been using, we've used real communication networks. And so the likelihood of quantum communication security and protection for our communications is increasing by the minute, shall we say. And because of the tiny, whiny weirdness, the entanglement thingy, it goes everywhere all at once and takes no time because time doesn't exist. My prediction, someday we will discover there's only ever been one photon. There you go. Save that as a prediction show. I'll say that for the end of the year reminder. Really end of the year. Only one photon ever. And we just keep seeing it in different forms. Also, a different study published in the journal Cell Researchers from Yale investigated the phenomenon of to feed a fever or starve a cold. And basically, if you know you've got a virus based on their evidence, if you have a virus, you should feed it. And if you have a bacterial infection, you shouldn't eat. And the body kind of makes you want to do this anyway. And so the researchers came at this from looking at animals and the researcher Medzitov, Ruslan Medzitov, who led this research, says, when animals are infected, they stop eating and they switch to a fasting metabolic mode. And the question was whether fasting metabolism is protective or detrimental. And so in the case of viruses, there's something about glucose metabolism that actually aids the body in fighting off the virus. So that's how the feeding works for viruses. And they studied this in mice, not in people. The experiments, basically, they infected mice with viruses or they infected them with bacteria and then checked to see what worked in the mice. Allow me to admit my ignorance for a moment. The common cold. I don't know. Is that a bacteria or a virus? It's a cold we don't know. You don't know. Very often you do not know. If you have the flu and you are actually diagnosed with the flu, that is a virus. So eating is great. It's good for that. It's good for that. But most of the time we don't have a diagnosis as to whether whether it's bacterial or viral. So unless you have a diagnosis, this might not necessarily apply. Other, like I just said, this is on mice, not in people. We don't know if this principle works in people. I'm going to guess that it's common. So here we go. Continuing on this. Medzodov says during a viral infection, eating provides glucose, which may be necessary for survival. But in the case of fasting, what you do is fasting leads to ketolysis and the production of ketones, which is a different type of fuel used by cells. And he says that possibly the ketones are what may lead to a different method of cellular tolerance to bacterial infections. It's a different response pattern to inflammation caused by bacterial infection. And so the study suggests the different diet preferences may correlate with different types of infections and we can't actually say how clinicians should tell patients how to eat, but potentially starve a fever, feed a cold, if the fever is a bacterial infection, and if the cold is viral, maybe. Very maybe so. For once, ancient wisdom comes true. Yeah. So that's one of those things where it's like, people have been saying this for a long time and it's very possible that this does apply. We didn't know the exact reasons or methodology. And it's still not for sure, obviously. This is a single study. But if I have a cold, they still don't know what to do. If you have a cold, you still don't know what to do. Exactly. Do what your body feels like doing. I'll feed you anything. At least try. I'll go down swinging. My final story for the night is one day, soon in the future, we may not be able to hide our emotions anymore from anyone. Your poker face might be sussed out. The emotions underlying your poker face might be determined by radio signals. Researchers at MIT in the computer science and artificial intelligence laboratory, CSAIL, have developed something called EQ Radio, which is 87% accurate at detecting whether people are excited, happy, angry, or sad wirelessly without on-body sensors. It uses radio signals, wireless signals to be able to capture information without the heart's activation. They're able to determine heart beats as accurately as an ECG monitor with a margin of error of only 0.3%. And then study the waveforms within each heartbeat to match a person's behavior to how they previously acted in one of four emotion states. Therefore, predicting, like I said, with 87% accuracy, they're happy or excited or angry or sad. And based on previous MIT work where they've been able to get audio out of a video, I project that one day they're going to look back on this show and see how absolutely terrified I am at this part of every episode as we get ready to have to read off a bunch of stuff really fast. And how my heart rate just goes from totally calm to exceedingly nervous and scared that I'm going to flub the ending of the show. You don't have to read all the names. That's me. That part, but that's your thing. Mine is just the stuff I read every time. I'm terrified I'm going to forget what to say. You can read it. You don't have to remember. Anyway, not only detecting the four emotions based on the previous recordings classifying, EQ Radio can detect emotions with 70% accuracy even when it hasn't previously measured the target person's heartbeat. So with no heartbeat baseline to go from EQ Radio. Question, if you can beat a lie detector, will you be able to beat this? Only if you can modulate your heartbeat. So only for listeners of this show, real quick, I'm going to teach everybody. If you can modulate your heartbeat, there's a way to do it. So no matter how excited you are. But isn't that how lie detectors work? Isn't that based on your point? Just for listeners of this show because I trust you with the information and I want you to get off anything you're charged with ever because you listened to the show and therefore I I love you as if you were one of my children that would want you to go free. What you do to beat the lie detector is from the very beginning you scrunch your toes. It's the thing they cannot see. It's down there in your shoes, it's in their socks. They're telling you to relax and so you will but you're going to be clenching your toes. If you clenched your fists it would work too but they'd see that. You clench your toes and now steady Eddie all the way through. You could say the moon is made out of cheese. I didn't commit this crime or that crime. In fact I was president through the United States three times and it'll all look like the truth. Do you know that personal experience? I come from a long line of Italians on one side of the family. I think as long as you're clenching something they said okay you're ready for this just in case it comes up. Here's how you beat the pest. Maybe you asked a lot of questions about Uncle this and so and so because in whoever here's what you do. Clench the toes. Clench those toes son. Clench those toes. Or clench something. It takes all the attention out of your system and directs it into one location and you will be steady Eddie. That's right. Steady Eddie. Calm that heartbeat everyone. It is the end of the show. It's true. We've really gotten to this point. So calm your heart beats. We have gotten through it. We are going to get through to the very end and you're going to take home all of the science information with you and you're going to have such a wonderful week until we come back again. Thank you so much for listening. Thanks for watching. I am going to take this opportunity to thank our Patreon sponsors. 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Thank you for all your support on Patreon. If you are interested in supporting us, you can find information at patreon.com slash this weekend science. Also remember that you can help us out simply by telling your friends about TWIS. Yeah, and on next week's show, once again, we're going to be broadcasting live. Oh my gosh, it's already the last week of September. What? 8 p.m. Pacific time, twist.org slash live. You can watch and join the chat room. There's so much great conversation in there, everyone, but don't worry if you can't make it, the past episodes are at twist.org slash YouTube or twist.org. Thank you for enjoying the show. TWIS is also of course available as a podcast. Just Google this weekend science in your iTunes directory, and if you have a mobile device, you can also look for TWIS, the number four droid, app in the Android Marketplace, or again, anything Apple Marketplace-y, simply look for this weekend science. 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There we go. Science. This week in science. This week in science. This week in science, it's the end of the world. So I'm setting up shop. Got my banner unfurled. It says the scientist is in. I'm gonna sell my advice. Show them how to stop the robots with a simple device. I'll reverse for all the warming with a wave of my hands. 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 it's this week in science. This week in science. This week in science. Science. Science. This week in science. This week in science. Science. Science. Science. Science. I've got one disclaimer and it shouldn't be news. That what I say may not represent your views. But I've done the calculations and I've got a plan. If you listen to the science you may just bed understand. It will be we're just trying to save the world from jeopardy. This week in science is coming away. So everybody listen to everything we say and if you use our methods to roll in and die we may rid the world of toxoplasma and the eyes. This week in science. This week in science. This week in science. Science. Science. This week in science. This week in science, science, science I've got a laundry list of items I want to address From stopping global hunger to dredging Loch Ness I'm trying to promote more rational thought And I'll try to answer any question you've got But how can I ever see the changes I seek When I can only set up shop 1 Week in science is coming your way This week in science, science, science This week in science, science, science To the post-show, not that anybody who doesn't watch the show all the time But this is, that's what we're doing right now Slug! Slug! Blair? What's going on with the slug, Blair? It's a banana slug I like banana slugs. I kissed a banana slug in the sixth grade I thought we were going steady I kissed a banana slug when I went wine tasting When I was in college I don't understand why the song was, you know It was like about chapstick or something Or was it something? I don't know, I don't remember My cherry chapstick, was that the... I don't know, I just remember one of the people I was with when I did it Was like terrified of it I kissed a slug and I liked it And so I was like, pshh, stop being ridiculous I picked it up and I kissed it Because that's ridiculous, it's silly But this is the latest hashtag Blair's Animal Corner Piece of artwork that I've made So this and all of the others are available on Patreon For the $15 episode level If you pledge for a month, I will send you one of these originals It's on a canvas A hard piece of something that you put paint on With the canvas And then it's signed and dated And I so far have... It is hypno slug, I really think so Blair, can you bring that slug back up here? I'd like you to put it in front of the camera Where the eyes, we can pull it back a little bit Let me get a picture, I'm going to get you in there Now, not you, that's slug There we go, now I'd like you to move the slug Slowly back and forth across the screen No, side to side It's staring at me It's hypno slug, the eyes The eyes, the eyes follow you Yep, yep, hypno slug, Ed's right Hypno slug So this is, I believe, the sixth piece that I've completed I have four more backgrounds completed And I'm hoping to get, I will get 13 done within the next month I'll finish them all And then we will be all set for If everyone's game A 2017 Calendar Yeah, I think we need to start selling it Yeah, let's do pre-orders We need to start because When did we start, we started We started in November last year Selling them, which was kind of late, I think that It wasn't late, we need to start selling them now We can start selling them now, I figure we can do If you want, we can do a pre-order price And then we can do after we've ordered them price That is slightly higher and then That way we can have at least a gauge of demand There will be a price break if you buy ahead of time So that we make sure we have enough calendars And then we will have a date That we start shipping them by, which I assume will be Probably mid-November Because then everyone will get it well before the holidays Yeah, yeah, or at least by the holidays Yeah, by early December Yeah, because you want people to be able to give them away As presents and stuff Yes, exactly Hot Rod, Bikini twist calendar Is that like slugs and bikinis? I can do that Yeah, slugs and bikinis, that's going to be good Justin and a bikini I want, no, you don't really want that to you Well, it would be the researchers and the bikinis Not us, right? No, I decided a long time ago That I was never going to be in a bikini For anything related to my work Yeah, good call Because we're professional women, we don't need that I don't need that, no I however Justin can do whatever he wants I just don't have a hurricane Yeah, Justin can feel free I'll do a straight up topless Right Yeah, X was there Oh dear, my goodness Dear, dear, dear, dear We were going to do a topless episode But then we would tease that out And then when the showtime came It would be me that was topless I want you all to know this is a pantsless episode For me right now And of course you can buy more than one calendar You'll never know You can buy 30 Yeah, I can put in on order for 30 Get one for every loved one you have And friend It was a good calendar this last year I enjoyed it It was awesome, it's still awesome It's still got months to go This month was my favorite month Obviously I like the T-Rex, I do like the T-Rex Of course it's my favorite Come here calendar I need more desk space No, I don't I need more desk space I need more organizational space We're coming up on the Cephalopod October Yeah, so tomorrow is World Rhino Day Indeed it is And rhinos are awesome So everybody celebrate the rhino tomorrow And World Rabies Day next week Also the Insight Mars Landing Next Wednesday I hope everyone enjoyed their species Requiem Day at the beginning of the month You know, contemplated on some extinct species I did, I did But I kind of figured I was, you know Among the 100 people with the twist calendar Yes Which, by the way, I'm sure we'll have another brainstorming session For holidays to put on the calendar For the next one before it goes out So Yeah, we have our list from last year still Which I can dig up probably And then, because the same holidays will be there We'll just have to figure out the exact days they're on Yes, but if you were horribly upset That any were missing Now's the time to tell me Yeah And next, I mean the one thing that is going to go on the calendar Yeah, if anything was missing One thing that is only next year Not for a while is the solar eclipse I know Pamela and I believe Doug DeSals from Sacramento Davis Are going to be up in Oregon for the eclipse I would like to go find the eclipse I believe we should make a plan For people to come find the eclipse next year To gather with us Yeah That's exactly what I'm implying Let's do it, let's absolutely do that And eclipse gathering Now where I want to go I probably, I don't know if there's going to be A lot of housing and stuff Like camping there in that location might already be Booked up but There are cities nearby so We can figure it out Twist clips We can make it happen Yeah, twist eclipse, twist clips That's right If anyone wants to come to Oregon for a shindigery Oh Karen What Karen Yeah, that wasn't any money I did put that in my tax records My personal tax records Well, how much were they this year? What? How much did we charge this year for them? 25 plus shipping? No, it was 20 20 plus shipping And the shipping is what I got wrong I messed up on the shipping So let's maybe We need to make it 25 this year Because I don't think we actually made anything We made zero money We made zero monies on the calendar I'm just going to say I didn't do the US Postal Service I didn't do the US Postal Service as well Right No, yeah, no I mean profit would be nice Considering there was a bit of work in it I mean the personal time that Blair put in And that I put in And that Patrick put in People put time into the calendar And Yeah, it was extra It was an extra thing I think that I think that no one would regret A $25 calendar For pre-orders Well, no What do you guys in the chat room think? It's a very nice calendar $20 is kind of the calendar price Do people spend $25 on a calendar? I don't know When it's got that much on it It's as well worth it now And it's art Prime shipping I'm not Amazon flying out What? We got to hook that up though Oh, a downloadable and printable calendar That report says $25 seems okay So that means it's okay That means it's fine That means it's always right Yes Like his Twist Clips party I like Twist Clips I like Twist Pocalypse even better now And Gord earlier said the 2017 Twist Hypno Slug calendar Yeah, it's just going to be different Every month is going to be Hypno Slug In different scenes Do you guys want to see what I have so far? No Nope Okay Nope Keep it a mystery We'll see it a little bit later on as we go Yeah, we'll pull them out a little later Exactly Okay Yeah, I mean $20 is kind of the price But I feel like if it's considered as Yes, artwork, but also like a fundraiser for Twist I feel like We're actually trying to raise some funds for the show Get the public broadcasting tote bag You've got to give $50 Yeah, so we're trying to Get ourselves to Baltimore and get ourselves to New York And do this kind of stuff that I want to actually be Helpful to the podcast with these calendars I don't want it to just be Zero net I like it Yeah, exactly And I think everybody who got one last year Really enjoyed I've been really enjoying my calendar this year It's personal I love it And I honestly have really I don't have a calendar Because I forget it's that But my kids are like It's a new mind New picture New picture New animal They're like totally on it I'm glad they like it Oh yeah That's adorable Makes me so happy In fact, my three-year-old Wants to take it down as soon as possible And just be able to go through it She wants to look at all the pictures She gets irritated that there's just one up there And it's there for a whole month She wants to continue to flip through them Yeah, Kai does the same thing Soon as the year's over Yeah, as soon as the year's over It's just going to get handed over to her It's yours, you can have it And then there'll be a new one And she'll want to do the same thing We got to drive right up to And see a burrowing owl today A burrowing owl And Davis They're mostly sort of west of us But yeah, we have a decent population here And there's this one It's in the center of all these developed areas But there's these mounds of dirt And you can see They look like they've got holes all through them And there's this burrowing owl Sitting on this sidewalk That was long And there's this yet to be undeveloped lot And we pulled I saw it, so we turned back around And pulled up right next to it And it was just sort of there Looking at us checking this out And so we got a nice long view But of course, because it's small She assumes it's a baby It's smaller than owls she's seen before So this is a baby owl And then we saw somebody at the co-op And she had a parrot on her shoulder And so my three-year-old immediately Like, pop, look, look And I'm thinking, you know, she's pointing at the parrot And she goes, look, look She's a pirate She's a pirate I know, was this on the 19 that you saw? That's awesome Actually, it would have, yeah Actually, it would have been It would have actually been Maybe that's why she had her parrot Maybe she was a pirate I just thought I was like I was like ready for it You know, I was finishing her sentence She's like, look, pop, it's I'm like a parrot But she's like, she's a pirate Good Smart kid Because pirates have parrots Yeah Pirate without a parrot Any parrot on anybody's shoulder A paint of pirates at all It's not a pirate at all Say good night, Justin Good night, Justin Good night, Justin Where are you going tonight? I went down to my secret project That I've been posting on Facebook I went slightly horribly awry And I'm going to attempt to salvage it But I think that might also end badly I came up with a new rendition of it So I've got all these plastics courtesy of cat plastic that I need to glue together and create a new thing Hmm Guys, can't wait to see your secret project Yeah, so I'm going to be playing with glue and plastic for the rest of the evening This Go huff some paint That's not supposed to be in there That's a bit of canvas and the backing is cardboard But that's irrelevant It's the canvas that's stuck to the base of this otherwise perfectly formed ceramic mold that I thought I'd put enough mold release on to have it come out of there but apparently you're not ever supposed to put silicone and canvas together regardless of the amount of mold release you've used So that was a bit of a fail I'm going to recover it I'm going to take a runner at it at least with some maybe some some expanding foam or some resin I haven't figured out which I'm going to use on that one And then I've created a new I'm working on a new what do you call it? I don't know casting premise thing for the silicone then I'm going to create another one of those out of without the canvas this time because of the horrible fail that that was and see how that What's the art project these things going on? Nice That is very cool Excellent Excellent Excellent Uh, Dr. Schengesus loves us Love you too Dr. Schengesus Oh, I'm the human Thank you Somebody posted a link to me Shannon Hoover posted a link on YouTube to some cool video How to eradicate It's like it might be a a dead thing What is this? Oh, also I need to figure out a way to get to figure out a way to get smooth on as a sponsor What? They make all sorts of silicone mixes resin mixes and stuff and if we could somehow find a way to promote them through perhaps a project that we're working on for some samples of their material it would be hugely advantageous to the non-twist budget of mine Oh, so I had Exactly Well, because also they're they're extremely affordable I won't say where I was although I may have already given it up this place that does have resins and silicone mixes and I thought, okay this one is about half the price of Smooth-On's product So I took it up to the counter with the rest of the stuff I granted I was not wearing glasses at the time They rang it all up and it came up a couple of hundred dollars more than I thought it would I need to investigate this at the point of purchase before this goes any further and it turned out that the thing that I thought was a deal at 50 bucks was 250 bucks The two looked like a dollar sign Well, it was just because they used a little old school like you know you put it on those little tear-away paper things and it was stamped on the top of it and it was 25 something and I figured it was 25 something each I was actually figuring 50 bucks because the other version I would get of it would be like 80 bucks so this seemed like a deal and then it turned out to be 250 bucks So as much as I want Smooth-On as a sponsor they are a deal at a fifth of the price of inferior products at retail Let me just tell you That was a nice plug for them right there It is and it still might get me nothing But It's pretty much guaranteed to get you nothing Yeah See, I've already done it But Why pay for the promo when it came for free and yeah If anybody knows anything about Resin please email twistminion at gmail.com of what you've used in the past on what type of project because there are so many options once I've got the silicon mold functioning to use that I don't know what to use at this point Once Mike points out there was no light skin Jesus Without going as far as saying there was no any skinned Jesus I would agree that if there was a Jesus based on time and place you would be correct so he would have more no tone in there whatever it is Say goodnight Justin Good night Justin Good night Justin and I'm gonna say good night as well Good night Blair Good night Kiki Good night Good night everyone out there Thanks for watching another episode of This Week in Science