 Everyone, welcome to the late starting this week in science. We are live broadcasting our podcast and waiting for Justin to restart his computer in the hopes that whatever crackle their cause is just wiped away magically by the computer restart. He needs to toss those Rice Krispies out of his microphone. Yes, no Rice Krispies in the microphone. I hope everyone is ready for another episode of science discussed by people who love science. Hello, yes, we're here. Thank you for being here as well. Make sure that you give us a big thumbs up if you're on the YouTubes or wherever it is and am I slightly just waiting to see if Justin comes back before I actually start? There might be. But it is time for us to start the show because it's we're 15 minutes past time. Oh my. And yes, Gaurav, I saw the pillars of creation image from Halloweb is what they're calling themselves right now which is pretty funny on Twitter. It's gorgeous. Oh, Kiki, can you turn yourself up more? They're saying that I am way louder than you. Way louder. So that would that would mesh with my observation that Justin was louder than you that I turned myself up all the time. All right, somebody's sneaking in there the cat or something and turning down your game all the time. Don't touch my game. That's right. Oh, I can't be turned down. My microphone does not have volume. I can turn it is how's that? How's that? Everybody speak there. Testing one, two, three. One, two, three. Is that better? Now we're pairs. Oh, snap. Good. Is that a good? Now we're both louder, it says. We're both louder. Great. Okay. If we're all good. Oops. What a bit. Okay. Anyway, we're gonna do this show. I haven't seen Justin come in yet. So we can at least get it started. Blair, do you want to try to do the disclaimer? Yeah, you got it. And yeah, Aran Lore, it's probably Kai's fault for sure. All right. So let us start this show without any further ado because you're all here and we're here and let's make it go in three, two, this is TWIS. This week in science episode number 897 recorded on Wednesday, October 19th, 2022. Are you a mosquito magnet? Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Kiki and maybe sometimes I'm a mosquito magnet but tonight I'm gonna fill your head with whispers, spiders and stars. But first, disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. Technical issues are part of life and so I will be reading Justin's disclaimer tonight. Here we go. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. The following program is alive because knowledge is a living creature. It must eat a steady diet of data. The more reliable the data, the more it will sustain the creature. So the meals must be prepared in the proper method, the scientific method because knowledge is a living creature. It has memory through senses of observations and measurements, sensors and formulas of recognition. All need to be carefully recorded and conserved because knowledge is a living creature. It must reproduce to multiply and expand its chances for survival through learning by reading, watching, listening and doing on teaching process and the teaching process ensures that knowledge will pass on to the next generation and the next and the next. Knowledge is a living creature and we are all its caretakers. So take care of your knowledge and occasionally give it a little scratch between the years with This Week in Science coming up next. I've got the kind of mind that can't get enough I wanna learn it every day of the week there's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek. Good science to you, Dr. Kiki. And a good science to you too, Blair. We are here for another episode of This Week in Science and we will hopefully see Justin arrive shortly. He is doing some work on getting his computer back up and running and joining us on this stream. But we are back here and welcome everyone to another episode of This Week in Science. We're back again. We're gonna talk about the science. Woo, woo, woo. We have so many stories. I have stories about mosquito magnets, whispering brains and hidden star maps. Doodle-loo. What do you have for us? Just, I mean, nope, nope. Justin's still not here. Blair, what's in the animal corner? Oh, I have two ataras. I have animal vaccinations and social spiders. Social spiders, the ones that scare us the most. Yes, and I can tell you what Justin has if he will arrive because he put it, he wrote it down. Okay, what's he got? Justin says, quote, I've got a spicy recipe for disaster, multicellular bacteria and an age of the Neander humans. Neander humans. Yes. So if he arrives, we will hear those things. We will just have to wait and see. But as we jump into the show tonight, I would like to remind all of you who are here that if you have not yet subscribed to Twist, you can find us as a podcast on the places that podcasts are found. You can find us also streaming live weekly on Wednesdays at 8 p.m. Pacific time on Facebook, Twitch and YouTube. And we are easily findable. If you look for this week in science, we are also Twist and Twist Science on Twitter, Instagram and Twitch. But if all of this is just a lot to remember, just remember twist.org. That is our website. Doot, doot, doot, it's time for the science. Are you a mosquito magnet? No, actually. I usually, the people I'm with usually get bit a lot compared to how many bites I get. I'm very lucky. Fantastic. So we're gonna do a quick cut in here and see how Justin's doing. He's here and I'm gonna add him to the stream. Let's see how it goes. Hi. Are you here? Is it working? Why are we all at different heights? We still got some rice Krispies in the gears, unfortunately, but... Yeah, is it too crackly? Let's ask the audience. Why don't you talk some more, Justin? Tell us what stories you have for the night. What did I bring? I have a spicy disaster story. I have got something to do with... We got maybe 50% of that. Bacteria and age of the anvil. I've got great Neanderthals stories. I've got spicy danger and I've got multicellular bacteria that had not been described before. Oh, and those are so interesting. Such interesting stories. But it doesn't look like I'm gonna be able to bring them. It's too wonky. Yeah. Everybody says Justin's wonky. Everything... Joined from your phone? I don't know. Everything looks so good from this angle. Like, you guys don't seem to be delayed or anything. But my output is weird. So... I'll see you guys next time. Oh, no. So sad. I hope you are able to go back to sleep. No. No. I hope you're able to source some new cables or something. I don't know what's wrong with it. I have to figure out what's happening. And we'll get it fixed for next week. OK. Well, actually, before you go, hold on. Eric Knapp said, drop the video and see if that helps. So can you just turn off your video and talk? Are you saying it's my face? My face is the problem. So there it is without a camera. And with just audio. No, it's still crackly. It's still crackly. And we tried it with different mics and everything. So I am at a complete loss for why that might be. Yeah, shoot. I don't know how to fix it. Yeah. Why don't we try it with just video? Yeah, I know. Is there a call in option for StreamYard? I don't think there is, right? No. Yeah. But if you could figure it out from his phone impossibly, but still. Darn it. Well, Justin, if there's any other hardware in the house that you could try to join with, go ahead and give it a try. But otherwise, I guess we'll see you next week. This is so sad because he's right there. I know, I'm so sad. Yeah, Dave Gillespie does sound like a sync error or something. I don't know what's going. Yeah, although it's happening. By Justin. By Justin. Well, this might be a quick show. OK, well, I did not bring extra news like I usually do when there's only two of us, but you know what? That's fine. Get you back to bed. Yeah, get us all to the places we need to be. Well, this is a bummer. We're all a little sad, but we can keep going. And I was interesting. David Nevin said he looked and sounded fine. That's so weird. I have no idea what it is. But anyway, good night, Aaron Moore. As we are moving into the show, I was asking Blair if you're a mosquito magnet. We've heard previously on other episodes and conversations that Justin is definitely a mosquito magnet. Yes. Yes. No, I am not. Usually the person I am with gets. Lots and lots and lots of bites. And I get maybe one or two, if any, maybe none, maybe none. You're a lucky, lucky person. I get a few. And then my immune system goes, let's make that itch and swell. Oh, yes. Oh, no. Right. Well, research out of the Rockefeller University published this last week in Cell, researchers Leslie Voss Hall, head of Rockefeller's Laboratory of Neurogenetics and Behavior. And Maria Elena de Obaldia, who was a former postdoc in her lab, they wanted to investigate individual odor. And there is all sorts of evidence that not just carbon dioxide but scent related to a person's microbiota might influence how attractive a person is to a mosquito. So they had a very fascinating study in which they had people wear nylon stockings on their arms for six weeks. And then they took those nylon stockings and mixed and matched them with a bunch of mosquitoes to see what the mosquitoes were attracted to the most. And they found that there was one particular subject and they had everything blinded. It was a double blinded randomized controlled study so that they had absolutely no idea which person wore which nylon stockings on their arms. Any of that kind of thing. But they said Subject 33 was the most attractive to the mosquitoes. The 80s, Egypti were the mosquitoes they were looking at in this particular study. Four times more attractive to mosquitoes than the next most attractive subject in the study. And 100 times more attractive than the least attractive subject in the study. 100 times 100 fold difference in how attractive they were. So they were trying to figure out, OK, what was it that caused these differences? And they determined that there are about 50 molecular compounds in the moisture barrier of the skin, the sebum. And so they were able to determine that these particular compounds that were really attractive in these individuals were carboxylic acids that that are produced by bacteria in the skin so that these are compounds that bacteria are chomping on and then modifying. And then the scent of the skin is really part of it. So the whole surface of your skin, because it is full of bacteria and is very individual to you as as a person, impacts the way that the mosquitoes are attracted to you or not. And they tried to go in and. Change the odor receptors in the mosquitoes to see if they could make the mosquitoes less attracted to any individuals. And it turns out that the mosquitoes, the female mosquitoes have like backup after backup after backup for their scent system so that when they shut off one kind of receptor, it didn't matter. They were still attracted to people. And so and then they shut off a different receptor. It didn't matter. They just kept being attracted. They could not make it so that the mosquitoes were not attracted to people. So according to this particular study, we don't have a way to stop mosquitoes from being attracted to people yet. We don't have that. But is there a way to make yourself less intriguing as an individual, be less of a number thirty three, if you will. Right. So how can we how can we make individuals less of a number thirty three? And so that's the question. We don't have an answer to it yet, but the idea is perhaps we can have have moisturizers or other other compounds that contain the bacterial effervescence, the molecules of less attractive individuals that could possibly mask the attractiveness of certain individuals. So it really comes down to the microbiome is what this is saying. Yes. OK. But we know that elements of the microbiome can be influenced by genetics. We also know that elements of the microbiome can be influenced by people around you and your environment. Yes. So I would be very interested to know if they can drill down further. What part of your microbiome, like when you move in with new roommates, does it become more or less tasty to mosquitoes? So this is a really interesting question because they they set this study up in multiple parts over multiple years. And so Subject thirty three, who was this super attractor of mosquitoes, you know, over six years, things might have changed in this person's life. But their attractiveness to mosquitoes never did. That is wild. Because I am concerned because one of those people that I mentioned that is very attractive to mosquitoes is my husband. And when we went to the bayou, he got covered in bites. I think I had two. And I'm just very worried now selfishly because my microbiome has surely changed to be more like his. But it's like not not in such a way. OK, well, that's great attractiveness to mosquitoes has been impacted. Yes, I'm in the clear. These carboxylic acids that are being being used and created there, yeah, they seem to be. Individual based, so mosquito attractors, you're special. So cool for those of you who aren't and shucks and sorry for those of you who are number thirty threes out there. No, you number thirty threes. Exactly. It's like the mosquito red shirts. All right, so let's move on forward to your two attars. Yes, so I might actually take a little more time with this one since since we're down a host, because this is a pretty interesting story. So two attars. They're in New Zealand, and they're a really weird reptile. They are the sole surviving species in rincocephalia. So if you look at reptiles, you look at lizards. We look at snakes. We look at crocodilians. We look at turtles and tortoises. We don't know really if they're even part of reptiles or not. That's kind of a big question mark still. And then you look at two attars and two attars are the only species in their order that that currently is alive. They are different from lizards, even though they look like a lizard. He's showing a picture right now. If you're listening to the show, look up what a two attar looks like. It looks pretty much exactly like a lizard. But there are some very key things that that differentiate two attars from other lizards, just this is kind of a tangent. But I think that it's relevant to kind of understanding why two attars are evolutionarily really important and ecologically really important. They're not just a lizard. They're nocturnal. So they're a completely different niche than most lizards who are diurnal. They lay their eggs underground. They have completely different teeth. They have two rows of teeth on their upper jaw and one on the lower. So it's like the one tooth sits in between the two above it. And they they also pervert prefer colder temperatures than most reptiles, which also means they inhabit a different kind of niche than other reptiles might like other lizards. And the way that we know they're not just weird lizards. Oh, they also don't have external ear holes. They have their their skin go straight over their ears. But the reason that we know that they're evolutionarily not just lizards that have gone weird is that they are diapsids. So they actually have two temporal finestra holes in their skull, whereas all other reptiles only have one or all other lizards and snakes. Excuse me, Sauropsids, Synapsids have one hole in there in their skull, which like that's a hole I could do a lecture on on temporal finestra. But essentially this is this is like the smoking gun in the evolutionary record that shows that this is a completely different lineage of reptiles. So that that is a oh, that is a two atara. Yeah. So so you have you have a second hole. So it's really hard to see, but it's up. It's number 10 on this diagram. So there's a second hole in the skull that lizards don't have. They only have one hole. Anyway. Back to the story, two ataras are very, very, very endangered. In fact, they're not found on mainland New Zealand at all anymore. They are only on the remote islands. And there's a few reasons for that. But the main one is invasive species that eat two ataris. Oh, New Zealand. I think we've talked about the threatened species commissioner on this show before. New Zealand is working very hard towards a predator free 2050. They are really, really trying to remove invasive predators because they have so many endemic species, species that are only found in New Zealand. That that these nonnative predators like rats and cats are just destroying the population. OK, so all that to say, as you remove the predators, now there is space to bring the native species back. And so this was a study looking at reintroductions of two ataris from offshore islands. So we have these functional populations on the offshore islands and they want to bring some of them back to the mainland as predators are eradicated. OK, great. So now we can get to the actual story. This is a study from. Back at back. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So this is a study by Teheranga Waka Victoria University of Wellington. And they wanted to look at the impact habitat differences will have when reintroducing these these New Zealand species of special cultural significance to them, the Maori. So. They wanted to see basically. If you take an island, there's two pieces to this. If you take a population that is hung out on an island for a long time and you plop it on the mainland, can they survive? Just understanding that they have been on the island for a long time. Or have they grown to a custom to being on a remote island to thrive on the mainland? Secondarily, have things changed on the mainland since? Essentially, white people came to New Zealand and completely changed things, naturally speaking, and in other ways. So has it changed enough that that will impact the ability for the two Tuatara to survive? So what they did is they actually looked at the diet of the Tuatara's on these remote islands. And they were looking at they're essentially looking at their poop to look at what was in their poop to see what they've been eating. And they found that 40 percent of the dietary carbon in Tuatara poop had marine origins. This explained a large occurrence of headless seabird carcasses. Oh, my gosh, all over the island. So Tuatara's, they're not that big, but they are they're hearty. They got those those fancy teeth I mentioned before. And so it looks like seabirds are a really important piece of their diet, at least on these islands. The seabirds are a crucial source of polyunsaturated fatty acids, P-U-F-A's. And they can get that from eating seabird eggs, eating fledglings or even eating those adults or, I guess, adult heads, if you so choose. But there's no seabird colonies like that on the mainland. We don't know if there have never been seabird populations or if there's just not now. We don't know if Tuatara's always ate seabirds or if they only eat seabirds on these remote islands. So when they're reintroduced, what would what will they eat and what will be the physiological implications if they have a reduced source of P-U-F-A's, for example? In the eco sanctuaries they're currently released in on the mainland. They're eating a lot of skinks, geckos and ground nesting native birds, all really good sources of other nutrients, but not good sources of P-U-F-A's. So knowing all of that, this more than anything just shows that the biological communities on offshore islands can be really different from those on the mainland and that, of course, species are part of a complicated interwoven web of predator and prey. Yeah, but that essentially there's a need for a holistic view of restoration and a measured approach to reintroductions because even if, OK, now we got the space, what are they again? Yeah, yeah. And the idea of being making sure that they're predator free, it's like, OK, what predators? Because obviously the Tuatara's are predators to the seabirds and there is an ecosystem and, you know, but it's the invasive predators. What are the can we get and but have the invasive predators been around long enough that now they are just part of the ecosystem? Yeah, and I think that that's to piggyback on that. If the Tuatara has been gone for the main from the mainland for long enough, and then you plop them back over there and let's say they used to eat seabirds or not, but these individuals do and then they pivot their attention to something else similar or different, I don't know, is that going to somehow completely change the relationship to predator prey in that ecosystem if they start measuredly targeting a specific species that's not used to pressure from the Tuatara. Because they've been absent. Yeah. How is that going to affect other species around there? Right. So it's it's complicated. It's an open system. It's especially, I mean, you've got birds who can fly in and out. You have two Tuatara's who could probably swim a little bit. And yeah, the the openness of the system is something that we have to take into consideration. Yeah, and it's research is so so essential to understand it. Absolutely. And when you're you're kind of. Letting nature retake a space and you're trying to go backwards in time. It's not a snap of the fingers. OK, we'll just we'll we'll bring everything back and everything will be fine. It's there's there's been decades or sometimes sometimes centuries or even longer of adjustments to the system. Yeah, from the impacts that we made. And so it's not so easy as to just go, OK, we'll just release some Tuatara's and everything will be great. Just release it. It's all good. We'll put it back to what it used to be. Right. You need your Puffas. Puffas Puffas Pufas. Yeah, Puffas. As long as it's not like our U.S.'s. Yeah, Puffas from Seabird hits. Yes, Puffas from Seabirds. Good luck to the Tuatara on their return. Sometimes we have to look for things more deeply. It's not ecosystem, necessarily, but historical. Sometimes we have to look beneath what is right in front of our faces. And in a new paper this week in the Journal for the History of Astronomy, researchers have detailed the medieval parchment from which they have discovered ancient star maps, details of coordinates from the very first, earliest centuries of time from a and one of the first astronomers, Hipparchus. And Hipparchus, apparently, was detailing the skies, probably inspired by the Babylonians originally. And he wrote down his stuff and apparently it got scraped off and written over by other people who needed the parchment at some time later in time. And so these researchers were looking at these old parchment that had been preserved at a library. And one of the graduate students who was kind of looking at these parchment over the summer, it was like, hey, there's some weird stuff in here. And so they got these parchment to a research center in France, the CNRS, the Net French National Scientific Research Center. And they were able to look under the biblical writings on the parchment and were able to find Hipparchus' original coordinates and have they have been able to translate and determine these under layers of the parchment and have been able to show based on modern understanding of how our solar system and the universe moves. And the time difference between now and 129 BC that he was very accurate that he had been using technology of the time to be able to really pinpoint the origin, the locations of stars in the sky based on a multiple coordinate system. And was really, this was like the beginning of astronomy, even though other people later kind of got the credit for it. And so Hipparchus and his discoveries were swept under the rug, well, or scraped off of the page over time. And so this is the first known map of the night skies that was created and catalogued by Hipparchus, the ancient Greek astronomer. That's really cool and also sad. I know. But what's cool is that people who are so focused on continuing to dig and look and goes, that doesn't follow, that doesn't fit right here, what am I looking at? And then to dig more deeply and to be able to really find these ancient writings. And if you can consider now with our modern technology and our understanding of astronomy, you know, we've got telescopes, we've got computers, we've got all sorts of things that help us do what we're doing. I mean, they were using very primitive lens systems to be able to view these stars in the sky, to be able to identify their locations, especially to give them coordinates in the sky that were so accurate. So the amount of work that must have gone into Hipparchus' efforts was probably very, very intensive. But yeah. Yeah. Very, yeah. He was an early discoverer and was the father of the field, even though other people decided that we're gonna have to keep digging. No thanks. We're not ready for us. Yeah. Come back in a couple hundred years or something. Yeah. But what I knew, not new word, but the multi-spectral analysis is the technology they were able to use under using different lights to be able to see what was there in the parchment of the pages and what they call this kind of a multi-layered document is a palimp set. Like in National Treasure, you just need some lemon juice and some Benjamin Franklin x-ray specs, right? Oh, yes, exactly. That's what it's always the lemon juice. Yeah. Invisible writer. In reality, an acidic liquid going on to an old parchment is probably a very bad idea. Don't do it. Yeah, the conservators would not be okay with that. Yeah. You can borrow it, but yeah, no. So, I'll see. Justin had some great stories, but I didn't prepare them, so I can't talk about them. So let's talk about some ostrich-like dinosaurs. Oh, heck yeah. That were discovered in Mississippi. Right. That's awesome. When we think of ostriches or we think of like big bird-like dinosaurs, we think of Australia, right? We think of the big terror sores and terror birds and other things, and apparently, however, there's a group of ostrich-like dinosaurs. They're not birds yet. They were ostrich-like, and so their name are the ornithomemosaurs. So like, bird-like dinosaurs, ornithomemosaurs. And so they were able to look at these fossils from the Appalachia region, which is actually really rare because the ecosystems, like the lands and everything, they haven't seen a lot of the fossils from this Appalachia region. But at one point in time, back when these dinosaurs were roaming North America, North America was not North America. It was split in two, and so you had an area, Laramedia to the West and Appalachia to the East, and this was during the late Cretaceous period before all of the, you know, before the big meteor came and destroyed everybody. But so this area, the Utah, not spelled Utah, it's E-U-T-A-W formation of Mississippi, they were able to find these new fossils of these giant dinosaurs. The foot bones are about 85 million years old, and these bird-like dinosaurs probably were about 800 kilograms. So one of the largest of this particular example. And the authors say the coexistence of medium and large-bodied ornithomemosaur taxa during the late Cretaceous Santonian of North America does not only provide key information on the diversity and distribution of North American ornithomemosaurs from the Appalachian landmass, but it also suggests broader evidence of multiple cohabitating species of ornithomemosaurian dinosaurs in those ecosystems in that period. So ornithomemosaurs. Look at him. What am I even looking at? I want to try to paint a picture, but it's really difficult. It's like you took a dinosaur, a kind of medium-sized dinosaur looking thing with like the long neck and the kind of small pointy head, and you made it really fuzzy, and then you had it naked on the feet. And then you also had itty-bitty wings just from the elbow to the tip of the fingers. Yeah. What a weird-looking thing. These are just hanging out in Mississippi. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Hey, weird can be beautiful. I'm not saying it's not beautiful. It is weird, though. It is, but it's just a fantastic discovery, and I love the idea that there were these giant ostrich-like dinosaurs that used to run around ancient North America. Did I count? Going for it. Let's do this. There were many of them. It makes sense that they would be everywhere, that these weird ostrich-y-thick-like things would be everywhere. It's a really successful body plan. Right, they can run fast. They have big, strong legs. They have a long neck that can maybe, you know, it's giraffe-ish or whatever. They can reach high places. They can maneuver their head various places. I mean, the big, long neck does give quite a target for a larger predator, but when you're 800 kilograms, you're still doing pretty well, size-wise. Yep. I would think, I would think, yeah. This is This Week in Science. Thank you so much for joining us for another episode of Science News Discussion. We're so glad that you're here joining us. If you love the show, please share it with a friend today. All right, let's come back to more This Week in Science. And you know how I said that we were going to not do the COVID segment of the show anymore? Yeah, I didn't believe you. I didn't believe you. You know, and I don't want people to take me seriously as I joke COVID's over, because it's not. And that is something that we need to consider. We are definitely moving forward with the understanding that COVID is definitely a part of our lives for some time to come. I just got vaccinated yesterday. So I've been dealing with that, but that's OK. That means it's working. Your body's attacking it. This is our world health segment. It is world health. You know? Maybe you can spin it towards the positive a little bit. That's what I definitely like to do. So we'll start with the bad news first. Research out of UC Davis this last week determined that, yes, as we've heard previously, COVID-19 does infect neurons and induces inflammation in the brains. In their studies, they weren't looking at rats. They weren't looking at mice. They weren't looking at preserved brain tissue or collected tissue from dead people. They were looking at rhesus macaques, which are a model species for humans because they are very similar physiologically and evolutionarily. What they determined publishing in cell reports this last week is that their work shows that aged monkeys with type 2 diabetes experienced the worst virus induced neurological damage in which the virus induces the immune system to attack synapses in the brain. And so what you find is microglia in the brain, which normally support the cells, are suddenly attacking the neurons. And this understanding can lead to a better understanding, a framework to understand these long-term neurological systems, which are becoming more and more commonly acknowledged among the medical community and with people who are recovering from COVID-19. And a different study by the Karolinska Institute have also looked at infected, this is a model system of brain organoids with infection with SARS-CoV-2. And they also saw that the brain's immune cells excessively eliminate synapses. And they acquire a gene expression pattern that has been observed in neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer's disease and that is also similar to what the UC Davis researchers report. So the effects of what the virus is doing in the brain are leading to similar impacts to some neurodegenerative diseases that might occur for more genetic reasons, but this is virus-induced. So I found it interesting that there were two studies out this last week that kind of were converging on this very similar evidence. The good thing is that as we understand more, perhaps we can block these effects from happening, perhaps we will understand how we can create treatments for people who have had COVID-19 because as we talked about previously in the show, this is not necessarily a, oh, only people who get severe COVID-19 experience these effects. This is also being reported in mild infectious cases. Yeah, and that's a really common complaint, I think for people who have COVID anecdotally is that they complain of COVID brain fog for a while after infection, even for mild cases. And this could have something to do with that. Yeah, it definitely could have something to do with it. And then moving away from the effects of long COVID and what happens to your brains, I mean, the reason I talk about this kind of stuff is like, yeah, it's like, hey, get vaccinated. Maybe we can help each other out, you know, we're vaccinated and limit the spread of this virus. Let's, you know, the more people are vaccinated, the more protection there is. It's good for our communities. But okay, there is a big hubbub this week about research happening at Boston University in a biosafety lab level, a level three biosafety biosecurity lab at BU's National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratory. There is a question as to whether or not research they did in which they took the Omicron spike protein and put it together with the Delta version of the virus, basically got rid of the Delta spike protein and gave it the Omicron spike protein to see what would happen, how that would affect, yeah, see how that would affect the... To see what would happen? That was what I was about to add. Why would you... To find out that. Why they are doing it is to determine whether the mutations that affect infect, that affect infectivity and lethality are solely in the spike protein or whether they are mutations in other areas of the virus. So it's to be able to understand where we can target our treatments. As we're seeing more and more antivirals become less effective, as we're worried about future vaccine, you know, how are we going to keep protecting against these things? The researchers, I think they did a bad job of communicating their pre-print work, which hasn't yet been peer reviewed, but they focused on the fact that 80% of the mice died in their study. That's a lot, right? However, this virus combination has already occurred naturally. We've already found a naturally occurring version of the Omicron spike with the Delta virus, and it kind of went away. So it's probably out there a little bit, but it has not become one of the more successful viruses. So number one, there is a big concern about how the study was done... Well, the study was done in a biosecurity level three facility. So it was done under safe security practices. The way that they communicated the amount of mice that died in their study is a big deal, but at the same time, the original Delta virus killed 100% of mice in studies. So this particular combination reduced the lethality of the virus. And as I said, the natural experiment doesn't seem to have gone very well in humans. So the big question is, did they have the authorization to do this from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases? And the NIAID has funded this laboratory, and they said they never heard anything about this study that this study was gonna happen. And they said that they would expect a study like this, which is potentially called the gain of function experiment, in which you're giving a virus a function that it didn't necessarily have before. I think there is a question as to whether or not this is a gain of function experiment, as opposed to just a... I don't know, I think there's a debate there to be had. But they're looking into it, and people are now really questioning the entire regulatory structure of when is government money when is government money, how is it involved, and what is required before a university, which does have a group on campus that says, yes, a review committee who says, yes, you can do this study. And so their review committee said, yes, go ahead and do the study. But they never asked the government if they could do it, even though there was potentially government money involved. Now, it's a very interesting situation. I have a question that maybe you can answer for me here. I can't answer it, I don't know. This isn't a hypothetical illness. This is something that is currently happening. And as you mentioned, this is a combination that currently exists. Why is research money going to testing mice when people are being infected every day and you could be collecting data on actual real-life sick people? Like, why when I got COVID did no one send me something that said, would you like to be a part of this study? Can you send us a swab? You know what I mean? There's hundreds of thousands of people right here like that you could test. And you could test how sick they got. You could figure out which variant they're carrying. You could figure out how long their fever lasted. You could gather so much data. Even if only 1% of people who are infected actually give you data. Right, but you can't manipulate the situation by forcing a particular virus. It's all going to be observational. It's all going to be, you know. But you could figure out which variant they have. And especially if this combination exists, even if it exists in a very small amount, but if it exists naturally, then you will catch some data for that specific combination. Yes, yeah. But with the numbers of mice that they can test on, which is lots of mice, even though mice are not people. There's lots of us too. Yeah, yeah. But with what they have concluded from the study is that the mutations in the spike protein of the omicron variant are responsible for the strain's ability to evade immunity. People have built up the vaccination infections, or both, but are not responsible for the apparent decrease in the severity of the omicron viruses. So the severity of the disease is due to mutations elsewhere in the omicron virus. But spike protein is related to infectiousness. So it's going to be, and it's important information to have but yeah, there are lots of questions about. It's just, if it's government money, it's, I'm just curious. I don't, it just, there's a sample size right here. I don't, anyway. Yeah, yeah. Like Rick Levin is saying, people don't have a control. People have, people don't have control. Well, people don't have control, but we do have a control, and it's people who are negative for COVID, right? Yeah, that's true. So, yes. That's, anyway, I don't know. Yeah, but anyway, that's the fun news on the COVID front these days. I do enjoy the scientific brouhaha, you know, especially when it gets people talking about the way that science is done, the way that regulations manage the transparency of research like this, which is one of the hypotheses of how we originally got the virus in the first place, right? Escape from a lab in Wuhan where researchers were putting together some COVID-2 viruses. I was thinking that too, that seems like that PR, yeah. Yeah, so, you know, there are definitely, there are conversations definitely to be had moving forward. Yeah, let's do that thing people accused us of doing. Exactly. Oh my goodness. That's it for our COVID corner for the day. This is this week in science. Unfortunately, we're missing Justin today, but Blair and I are here to talk about the science with you. If you are enjoying the show, I do. I would ask, I implore you, please head over to twist.org. Click on the Patreon link and become a Patreon supporter. Patreon is how we keep this show going and support our efforts here, and you are a big part of making this all happen. So we thank you for your support. We really cannot do it without you. Let's come back now to more this week in science with Blair's Animal Corner with Blair. What you got, Blair? Thank you so much. I can't start without it. There's a story I really want to talk about, but before that, I have a quick one related to vaccinating wild animals. Yes, when there are zoonotic diseases, potential zoonotics, things that can jump from animals to humans, and it is something that is running through a wild population. It's a good idea to try to control that. That can include things like rabies, influenza, and tuberculosis. A lot of the time, people control those diseases in wild animals by baited oral vaccines. So basically they put out bait food, a nice good treat for that individual species, and they stuff it with pills, or inject it with a serum, or dust it with something to vaccinate those animals. But the problem is when you're doing that, how many animals are you double dosing? Are some animals not getting it at all? Are enough of them getting it to create herd immunity? These are all great questions. I do not know the answers. Yeah, and it's pretty difficult to test. But a team of scientists from the International Institute for Zoonosis Control and Hokkaido University has developed a model to estimate the effectiveness of bait vaccination in wild animals. This all happened when in 2018 there was an outbreak of classical swine fever in Japan. This is the first one after 26 years. It was found in a pig farm and wild boars as well in the same area. And it was spreading among the wild boars, so they started a bait vaccination campaign in 2019. And in order to test the effectiveness of that campaign, they constructed a mathematical model that describes relationships between three variables. Changes over time in the proportion of immunized animals, so you have to actually be able to check to see if they're immunized, the number of vaccine applications, and the effects of the vaccine. So because this was a smaller population, this is totally me guessing, but so it was partially in a farm, so you're able to check it versus captive animals. But then also in the wild, you could test the poop to see if there's trace of the vaccine in there or trace of the disease. You can also check for deaths and all sorts of other things. So basically all of that together means that you can test the effectiveness of this one bait vaccination campaign. So once you know the proportion of immunized animals in a population, you can with that combine it with the data about the number of vaccine applications. And from there, you can estimate the effects of the vaccines measured as a proportion of animals who acquired immunity. And that's all fancy words to say in this one very restrictive population and this one very restricted test, they could then create a model. And that's all what this is about. So now they made a model, they were able to test with real data collected during the bait vaccination campaign. And they show that the vaccines measurably increased the proportion of immunized animals in wild boars. Great. So it looked like it was working. This was able to show that the bait vaccination caused a quantitative increase in the proportion of immunized animals. It worked basically. But this allowed to have a model that now does not require the data on the number of the individuals in a population, their movements within a study area, or the history of bait vaccine intake. You are, you can now use this model to gauge the effect of oral vaccines for a number of diseases to study different applications of the vaccines, to design improved vaccination strategies, all of this by testing against this model that was made with wild pigs. So it is one instance of one kind of animal. So I'm a little hesitant to say that this could be applied to the entire animal kingdom. But I think it's very cool and I think it's a good use of the resources that exist. And when opportunity strikes, kind of the question I was just asking related to COVID, there was an outbreak. Let's use this current outbreak to gather data, to be able to prepare for future outbreaks. So I think that's a neat application of that use. Yeah. And you can't, I mean, you have to start somewhere, right? So you start with this model and then you say, is it going to work elsewhere? Can we apply it to other things? Does data match from other situations? Right. And is it worth it? Is this bait campaign going to work? Can you have a guess? And will it work on humans? Will it work? Can we leave bait traps for people? I think using wild pigs would be fine for human behavior. But yeah, the rest of the animal kingdom, not so sure. Bacon. Bacon. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, just a neat tool for bait vaccinations in wild animals. But really, really, really what we're all here for. The story you've been dying to talk about. Yes. We are all here to talk about social spiders. And I just recently saw somebody else making a joke like on TV or something about like, oh, I really don't like spiders, but you know, at least they haven't figured out how to work together. If they do that, I'm done. Actually, if you listen to this week in science, you know that they already do that. Sorry. You're welcome, ASMR friends, anyway. So social spiders. We know they exist. We saw their giant field in, I think it was in Australia. We've talked about how they take care of babies on previous episodes. I'm sure you could search socialspider on twist.org and find some good stuff. But new research has identified how social spiders may have evolved different ways of hunting, showing that it is not kind of a one-off random thing that happened. It's something that has popped up multiple times in spiders. A few species have evolved to be social and live in groups known as colonies. We do know that to start with. They live in these large family groups. They share communal nests. They share childcare duties. They even share hunting and foraging. But this new study shows, this study from University of Portsmouth, that environmental conditions may have shaped how species develop different strategies of cooperating and hunting. So it's a lot more complicated than just, there's a bunch of us here. We can all work together. They looked at different responses to prey stuck in webs among three social species of velvet spiders. They found substantial differences between them. They looked at the African social velvet spider, the Indian cooperative spider, and the African social spider. These are all the same genus, so they are closely related individuals or species. But they, they each attacks prey differently. Some of them only sent out the number of spiders necessary to take down the prey. Small number for small prey, large number for large prey. Some of them were extra shy, with very few spiders attacking prey, regardless of the size. They were slow to attack and they rejected a high proportion of prey. They're like, too much. Some of them, so that was the African social velvet spider, the Indian cooperative spider, attacked prey, regardless, irregardless of size. Like just, it doesn't matter. I'll take anything, but larger numbers of spiders attacked when the prey was actually small, which is interesting. The African social spider preferred medium sized prey, more spiders engaged in small prey, less in large prey. So they actually went down if it was a bigger spider or a bigger payload, I guess. So there's a couple theories to this. One being, so remember these are all the same genus. So there's a, there's a good chance that they actually have an evolutionary ancestor that was social. Right. So the, the theory actually is that when spiders become social, because they're all hanging out together and helping with child rearing, they actually become really inbred. So evolution can kind of run away with itself really quickly. So that means that you can see a lot of change in a short amount of time in the genome and in the behavior of a population. But this also just shows that there's more than one way of being a social spider. It's not just the simple, we work together. There's, there's a lot of dynamics involved there. And in fact, the African social velvet spider and the African social spider live in the same place, but they have different hunting strategies. Whoa. So one is cautious and choosy. The other one is opportunistic. So they have actually developed different niches to co-habitate in the same space and eat almost identical food, but do it differently. So not just two spiders of related, of the same genus, but different species hanging out together, two colonies of spiders hanging out together that are very closely related and they are able to both eat because they have different strategies. So this indicates that where two different social species share the same habitats, they have their own niches. They have, they have in competition, instead of one out competing the other, they have diverged and specialized away from each other. So this means their social behavior is much more complex than we thought. It means that social spiders are, are just more complicated than previously thought about the different types of social dynamics that exist. And that there's something more going on than just we all got to eat and we all live in the same place. There's a decision making process happening, which, you know, whether it's subconscious or intentional in some way, who knows. But really, there, there, it's more complicated than just a bunch of spiders living in the same place. I don't, I don't need to know more, but. Well, what, what a great strategy to have to be able to, to pick a different method of sharing the same biome, sharing the same space, you know, almost you can picture an entire biome made up of spiders with different strategies, where it's all spiders everywhere, some are on the ground, some are up in the trees, some are catching flying insects, some are going underground for their prey. But you know, they could just be spiders everywhere. We don't need all of the breadth of, of fauna that are out there. Spiders can feel like a niche. No, that's okay. I don't need that many. Listen, I love spiders. Everyone knows I love spiders. I love talking spiders on this show. I don't need that many spiders. Thank you. A spider tried to say hello to me in my car in my commute home today, right in front of my face. Well, I was driving. It was great. Exciting. Sure, that was an exciting moment. You're early for your cue. Anyway, that's what I got for the Animal Corner. This just shows so much we, that there's so much we don't know, right? We don't understand about spiders. The fact that there are spiders that are social is just amazing. There's just so much to learn. Yeah, we didn't know that a few years ago, I feel like. That's pretty new information. And now we're figuring out it's way more complicated than that. Oh, yeah. I'm still interested in that strategy of the more of the group attacking the smaller prey. I'm wondering if it's just the smaller prey is more likely to get away? I was thinking that or more dangerous. More dangerous. Yeah. Depending where they live. And what the prey is. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. It's fascinating. We need to know more. I don't want to know. Especially if that smaller prey is an ant. If you contain it and it gets back to where ants are, then you're in trouble. Then you stop in the predator and you might end up being the prey. It's true. It's tricky and dangerous. Tricky, tricky to be a spider. Hey, Justin, do you want to talk about Neanderthals? I do, but I really want to, I'm going to talk about the earlier stories first. Okay, there we go. Jump on in. Yeah. So speaking of danger, segue, one of the most dangerous places in any home is the kitchen. In some homes, it's the trampoline set up in the playroom with low ceilings. But for most homes, it's the kitchen. There's sharp objects, boiling water and oils, occasional fires, and a smorgasbord of uninvited microbial visitors. Poor food prep practice and contamination by microbial hitchhikers is a major source of foodborne illness. Salmonella, Campylobacter account for nearly two million infections a year in the US according to the CDC. A big portion of those illnesses are derived from raw meat handling, inadequate cooking times or attempts, issues with hand washing, sanitation of kitchen surfaces and utensils. So researchers, the Rutgers School of Environmental and Biological Sciences and researchers at North Carolina State University together set out to test kitchen surfaces for potential cross contaminating practices that could lead to pathogen ingestion. And the way they went about it, it's pretty interesting. They had 371 subjects, cooking an identical turkey burger recipe. And they had several kitchens that they used of various sizes, some were small apartment style kitchens, some were larger teaching kitchens, presumably at one of the universities. And they also used a food bank for larger scale food prep stations. Participants prepared the meal consisting of raw ground turkey patties, a seasoning recipe along with a prepackaged salad. To simulate the movement of a pathogen across the surfaces of the kitchen, researchers inoculated the meat ahead of time with a bacteriophage that they could utilize as a safe tracking device. Basically they could trace it after the experiment. None of the participants knew that they were taking part in a food safety study. So they prepared the meals, researchers observed the objects and surfaces used or touched that once the meals are done, researchers swabbed everything the participants made contact with to test for the presence of the tracer. They found a major contamination culprit in their test kitchens. Can you imagine what it was? Where would you think? The spatula? That's a good one. Hands. According to Donald Schaffner, Professor of the Department of Food Sciences at Rutgers, in addition to more obvious surfaces like cutting boards, garbage can lids, and refrigerators handles, here's something else that you need to pay attention to when you're trying to clean and sanitize your kitchen, trying to be clean and sanitary in your kitchen. Researchers found that the most frequently contaminated objects were drum roll? Oh, the towel. The towel. Oh, that's a good one too. But that wasn't it. Keep the drum roll going. Any last second guesses? Have no idea. I always guess. But one was the most contaminated? Spice containers. I touch that every day. Every day. And when's the last time you're like, I need to put my spice container through a vigorous sanitary wash? Never. Never. Oh, getting in there with those sanitized objects were the spice containers with about 48% of the samples showing evidence of contamination. This prevalence of contamination was significantly different from many other surfaces sampled. You know, cutting boards and trash can lids were the second, third most contaminated. Faucet handles were the least contaminated objects. Because we wiped them down a lot probably thinking about it. We were surprised because we had not seen evidence of spice container contamination before. Most research on the cross-contamination of kitchen surfaces through the Handler family poultry has focused on kitchen cutting boards or faucet handles and utensils and his neglected surfaces like the spice container and the trash bin lids. So. I'm going to go clean now. Everybody at the end of this show, go clean your spice containers. Yep. Oh boy. That's where it's all ended. And last I guess story that I might blurb some of the nanotalls, but others made sure I was interested in today. How did life begin on earth? We propose perhaps. Big question. It started deep in the ocean around thermal vent maybe, had the right precursors of life getting encapsulated in tiny pockets of clay and muck, allowing for the experiment of life to get started and emerging initially as perhaps a virus or as a single celled creature. Eventually a multicellular creature with cells that performed performed more and more diverse functions. The beginning of complex multicellularity or life like us. But how did that leap take place? Maybe. Just maybe. It looked something like what was isolated from water dripping down a limestone cave on a wall on the island of Utah, southern Japan. This cave wall. So they didn't go there looking for this. This is sort of an accidental discovery. These are researchers in Japan who are looking for enzymes produced by novel bacteria that might assist them in breaking down plastics. So that's what they were doing their mass collection for. Nothing to do with the story, but that's how this is sort of good observation and follow up is amazing because this is a now newly described bacterium that starts out as a single cell. But instead of remaining a single cell like most microbes, it then develops an organized body. Hundreds of cells. I don't know what even got this. Oh, look, you got that there. If you scroll further down into that, those are nice pictures. There's some, I think, videos involved as well. So develops an organized body comprised of many hundreds of cells. When the time is right, the cellular configuration then spits out a stream of single rod cells from its own multicellular configuration in the center of the thing. So when they grow that novel bacteria in the lab dish, it had this iridescent sheen to it that I hadn't really noticed in anything before. So shimmery, color-y kind of a look to it. It began to divide into long filaments. These strands formed long chains that then folded around and wrapped around itself to form a superstructure. Colonies stopped growing after just two days. As soon as they were put into the dish across that surface, they started growing. Two days later, they stopped. Then for two to three days, no real activity took place. Around day five, the flat sheet began to thicken in the middle, and it got bulky and it got a little cloudy, and these rod-shaped cells began appearing in the center. If they immersed them in water, these rod-shaped cells shot out of the microbial mass. They were rejected, basically, where they went on to start the process all over again. Sounds like a mycelium and a fungus in a mushroom. It's so interesting. This isn't like budding on the edge of an individual microbe. This is one microbe that split, split, split, split, but maintained contact and created this chain that it then wrapped around and then created this other novel version of itself in its rod form that it then spit out. So many things are to see. This isn't the first multi-cellular bacteria that's been discredited. Other bacteria have been known to have structures, chains or films, some more complicated structures that went under stress so that they can change locations. But unlike other known forms of multi-cellular bacteria, this one that they have called HS3 didn't just have different kinds of cells. Each type had a distinct structure and formed different points in its life cycle, as if responding to environmental cues like this immersion of water tells it to eject. Or the contact with a surface, then in this case the lab dish, told it to start the process of reproducing. In nature, it would have been contact with the wall. Okay, let's form this structure. And then when water reached that wall in the cave, and this is the cave researchers note, does occasionally flood. So this is a very reliable, repeatable environment for the evolutionary strategy that is developed within this organism. Finds the flat surface, creates the structure. Then the water comes, ejects more single cells, which then find a wall somewhere, start it over again. Very, very simple, very straightforward. But one of the interesting things I think it shows is that the paths to multi-cellularity may have been many. We talk a lot about how life really started just one time, as far as we can tell. It's the same components, it's the same, we all seem to be related to everything all the way back to bacteria. Genetically, things are all linked. The interesting thing though is that leap into multi-cellularity didn't necessarily happen to happen the same. We're probably all of us, you know, very complex life forms, mammals create animals, walking around. We're all related probably to the very same first multi-cellularity event in our history. But there may be other paths to becoming multi-cellular. We see a lot of diversity. So we've talked about how it's weird that life hasn't shown up more than one time, but that's because the niches have all been taken up. Here's a cave wall in this remote island in Japan where multi-cellularity or multi-cellular bacteria was allowed to exist. And perhaps a niche that didn't have anything preventing it from doing so. And it did so in a way that we haven't seen before. So there may be other paths to more complicated life. Final stories, I'll just blurb them because I know I've shown up late to the show. New dates have shown that Neanderthals in France and Spain definitely overlapped for a period of about 1600 years. That's a significant period. It's been very difficult to determine. One of the problems is carbon-14, which is usually reliable so carbonating, has a problem right at the time point when humans in Neanderthals are interacting. There was a short reversal of Earth's magnetic field, which weakened Earth's geomagnetic shield enough to allow for an extra pelting of cosmic space to generate a spike in carbon-14 in the atmosphere, which then throws off dating techniques right around 41 to 43,000 years ago. It has this weird effect of making things seem more racist than they actually were, or maybe a little older. It's all catiwankas in that record. Scientists have largely been able to sort that out. They've always had different ways of doing dating techniques, but they also have some specific calibration curves that they now use. So the newly determined modern current humans in Neanderthals coexisted in France and Spain for about 1600 years. That's interacting, but it would be extremely hard to imagine that they weren't. We have other evidence that says they likely were. One of the things they were looking at was the tools that were Neanderthal and then evolved Neanderthal tools towards what current modern humans were doing, and then the Neanderthals sort of disappeared. But if it's sort of disappearing after 1600 years of interaction, likely it was more of an integration event. And not to leave the subject of Neanderthals. Do you remember the Dnesiva cave? Yes. That's where we found out about Dnesivans. Well, there's also a lot of Neanderthals there. And those Neanderthals were about 120,000 years ago. Another set of caves within 100 kilometers of that one, there's been found to pick 13 individuals Neanderthals that date to about 56,000 years ago. And it turned out they did genomic testing on them. It's they're all pretty related, but they're not related to the nearby Dnesiva cave. They're much closer to the European Neanderthals. And one of the theories of this has always been why did the Neanderthals start heading away from Europe because they know there was this migration event? Well, if current modern humans weren't there yet 56,000 years, then it wasn't that they were pushed out by humans if they're already in Siberia 56,000 years ago. And they're the ones who are related to those that were seen migrating from Europe in that direction or thought to be. And it says that it was just the wandering Neanderthal lifestyle that took them there. And they likely weren't running from current modern humans. Who is it turns out we coexisted with just fine 1600 years. Anywho. This is at this day, the most Neanderthals that have ever been found in one location. And there's some really kind of it shows that they were a pretty tiny family. Oh, one of the interesting things that they did to us, while they are closely related, the related members were the females. Meaning that when it comes to mingling with other Neanderthal groups, it was the females that would go on and blind the other family. Something that is... I don't know what to go on and join the other family is exactly right. Might have been a little bit more unpleasant, but I take your point. Just your Neanderthal prejudice. Instead of the males going off and wandering and finding other tribes, it was the females. I'm just thinking back to reading Clay to the Cave Bear. That's all. The only way to view Neanderthals. It's all ancient people. I'm thinking about how the animal kingdom is about this sort of thing too. That's all. Your characterizing it is a very sweet like she packed up her spindle and she said, I'm going to go see the world. And that is I am almost willing to guarantee you not how it went. I don't know. I think that's very likely how it went. Okay, Justin. Women move between the communities and the men were... Of their own volition. Sure they did. Well, we don't know. We don't know. Just based on the animal kingdom. I don't know why you would assume this. That there was anything untoward about the Neanderthals. We know they died at Cave Art. We know they cared for their old. We know they cared for their dead. Most mating is untoward. That's why. Most mating on earth is untoward. Okay. We may have had kisses and with dating just with a record. I love the statement though. Mating is untoward. Watch a couple nature documentaries and tell me if you think those female Neanderthals went off on their own on purpose. Anyway. But it's interesting to know that they weren't sticking around and they weren't causing population genetic bottlenecks and that there was mixing between different groups and that's important. But when... Hang on a second. In the animal kingdom, when a male goes off and finds another group to join, like a young male baboon or a... I don't know what else does that is. Sea lion? Something. There are other things that do this stuff. You don't go, oh, that poor male baboon had no choice but to go and join that other group. Well, sometimes they actually didn't have a choice. They usually don't. They get kicked out. They're getting kicked. Yeah, they get kicked out. It's like leave or die. It's violent. Because they'll be killed by the older males. But that's always true of everything, but very civilized society, hopefully. Yes, but that's what I'm saying. We were painting this very rosy picture. Can't you romanticize for a moment? I'm just throwing out there that, you know, if we're being realistic about the motivation behind these things, that's all. Untoward. I have a feeling that there was very romantic courtship involved in the name of 1000 until proven otherwise. I will stand by this. All right, I have one story to end this show for all of us. You know, as you're sitting here listening to us talk about stuff, maybe occasionally a thought wanders into your head and your brain wanders off daydreaming for a minute when you come back and go, oh, what did I miss? What did I miss of the twist conversation? Yeah, that was me during the show all the time. Right? You're not supposed to say that. Oh, whoops. Was that out loud? Brain, quiet down. Hush up, brain. What? Yes. Well, researchers publishing in Cell Reports this last week, we're looking at the brain and its activity during various times of the day, looking at this hypothesis that there is memory formation that occurs during times aside from when you're sleeping. We know that when we're sleeping, our brain goes through all sorts of processes that are important for memory consolidation. But why is it that we get caught in these little, like, daydreams, mind wandering so often? And the researchers from the Institute of Basic Medical Sciences at the University of Oslo have said that we daydream for very brief moments thousands of times a day. And so what is actually going on there? They looked at the thalamic cortical circuits that are involved connected to the thalamus and the hippocampus and when they're active and when they're quiet. And they determined that the hippocampus gets really, really active for a while when there's stuff going on. And then it gets quiet. And what happens is the rest of the brain actually hushes up sometimes to listen to what the hippocampus is saying. And so you have this cortical network in which these mice who are awake and not sleeping, they didn't look in humans, they looked in mice. But they were able to determine that basically the brain goes through like these little tiny periods of quiet. But it's quiet as if it's trying to listen to the whispers of the hippocampus and that the hippocampus is whispering to the brain and telling it things that it needs to know. So not only is my brain actually talking to itself, but it's also eavesdropping on it's tough. Yes, yes. The brain is eavesdropping on itself. The brain is talking to itself. And this quiet wakefulness that happens when we're daydreaming and we let our minds wander, what happens is that this is potentially they say how the hippocampus is encoding memories during the day when you're awake. But yeah, you're not sleeping, you're awake. It's how the hippocampus works constantly and doesn't get all filled up and then dump everything out when you're sleeping. And that these, it has different electrical impulses and they say it's a bit like how different barcodes uniquely identify a product in a store and it happens thousands of times. And so even when we think our brain is just not doing anything useful, the daydreaming isn't very useful, it's really storing memory. And perhaps this is something that we, you know, those shower moments, those those thoughts that you have while you're having a long walk and suddenly pieces of information come together in your brain, that aha moment that occurs, you know, the we are told when we're kids, pay attention, don't daydream, blah, blah, blah, but daydreaming is actually a part of how our brains work and how information is connected, consolidated, how it's put together. And so those waking moments of quiet in your brain are actually really good for you. That's awesome. I am constantly having shower moments and things like that. It's some of my best thinking. Oh yeah. So that makes sense. It is. I'm a daydreaming believer and a homecoming queen. That's a monkey's, it's a monkey's reference. They were my, they were daydream believer. Monkeys? No, I'm kidding. Homecoming queen. That's right. Doctoral research fellow Christopher Nerland-Bearge says, we found that during quiet wakefulness, the hippocampus only sends weak messages about past memories to the rest of the brain so weak that these messages are lost in the clutter of information that the rest of the brain experiences. And so this led to the question, how can the brain hear this whispering from the hippocampus? And so it is this brain quieting, your brain quiets down. It becomes silent so that it can hear the whispers. I love that. Yeah. I just think that's really, it's like, oh, oh, no, something. I got it. The hippocampus is saying something. It's going to be something important. Shh, listen, listen to the whispers. That or some hippocampuses, the hippocampus might be, might shout. Get over the noise. One, one hypothesis, yeah, but one hypothesis that they say here, and of course they need evidence to back this one up, but it is, in modern times, we feel like our kids constantly need to be entertained or, you know, stimulated. There's YouTubes and iPads and all sorts of things. And that the researchers say maybe potentially it's good for your kids to be bored because with boredom comes more of the quiet wakefulness, comes more of the daydreaming, comes more of this putting together of things. So maybe it's better for your brain. And it's functioning and creativity to be bored, to daydream, to not be. And I encourage entertained showers, just in general, but also for this and. I encourage. Just on the hygiene. But also a dog forcing yourself to take like a minimum 20 minute walk, two times a day. Get out and you take the same route or you have a set of routes. So you're kind of on autopilot. It's so good. It's so hard to read my phone when I do that. So I hear that I hear this and then I think, yeah, that really makes a lot of sense that that sounds like good solid old people wisdom, you know. But then I'm like, what was the generation where they were un-entertained all the time, unengaged with something all the time, had a lot of downtime, and the world was much better for it. No, no, but think about it, Justin. If you're if you're sitting, churning butter for like two hours. What are you doing? You're daydreaming. Oh, yes, that too. Right? Oh, I wish I wasn't churning butter right now. I could be doing anything other than this butter churning. Man, oh man. But that's the point. That's the point, right? Is that you weren't you weren't doing that and you had a podcast ear in and you're watching something on the tee and you were, you know, it's it was that's kind of the idea is you had repetitious acts that allowed your brain to wander. When do our brains wander anymore? It's a question for us to ponder as we finish the show. This is like churning butter for me. I'm sorry. Oh, as we end the show. Oh man, Justin's like six seconds behind, I think. All right, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us. I think we've done all of our stories for the night. We've made it through. We got a Justin back. That was great. And so I would love to give shout outs to Fada. Thank you so much for your help with social media and show notes over on YouTube. Gord and Arnold are left earlier, but other people who helped keeping the chat room. Happy nice places to be. Thank you for that identity for. Thank you for recording the show. And Rachel, thank you for your assistance in editing the show. I would also love to thank specifically our Patreon sponsors. 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Look for Daily Tech News Show, all the places you find podcasts and videos and stuff. And you can you can hear us chat about that faux show. And on our show next week, we will be just in time for Twiso Ween. We'll be speaking with Dr. Vivek Kumar about bioengineering and tissue regeneration. Don't miss it. Nice. Yes, we will be back then for that show at 8 p.m. Pacific Time. Broadcasting live from our YouTube and Facebook channels and from twist.org slash live. Want to listen to us as a podcast? Perhaps well you carve your jack-o'-lantern this year? Just search for this week in Science Over Podcasts or found. If you enjoyed the show, get your friends to subscribe as well. For more information on anything you've heard here today, show notes, links to the stories will be available on our website, www.twist.org. You can also sign up for our newsletter. You can also contact us directly, email Kirsten at Kirsten at thisweekinscience.com, Justin at twistmeaning.gmail.com or me Blair at BlairBaz at twist.org. Just be sure to put twist T-W-I-S in the subject line or your email will actually end up as an encoded message that was written over in the future and we'll get it but it'll be in like a thousand years. Darn it. But we'll still get back to you. In the meantime, while you're waiting for your message to thaw, you can hit us up on the Twitter where we are at twist science at Dr. Kiki at Jacksonfly and at Blair's Menagerie. We love your feedback. If there's a topic you would like us to cover or address to suggestion for an interview or hiking that comes tonight, 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. Twist is in. I'm gonna sell my advice. Show them how to stop the robot with a simple device. I'll reverse global warming with a wave of my hand. And all this science is coming your way. So everybody listen to what I say. I use the science. This week in science. Science. Science. This week in science. This week in science. This week in science. Science. Science. Science. I've got one disclaimer and it shouldn't be news. That's what I say. Done the calculations and that is the end of the show. Thank you for joining us. It is the after show. Woosh. Woosh, woosh, woosh. Ah, Jalix Sauce. Thank you for joining us. Daydream while you clean your spice rack before the spiders take over. That's absolutely, absolutely true. I think we are all gonna go take care of that. Mark it. Justin is auditioning to be the micro-machine's maid. That's me. Yeah. Where did he go? He turned off his, he's here but he's not here now. Yes. Thank you all for joining us for another show. Apologies for the weird crackliness and the connectivity issues. Someone earlier in the chat said, Noam Sain said that they had seen some other crackly live streams. So maybe somehow it's related to Restream YouTube. So that is something for us to look into and actually just a quick Google search did, I did discover people talking about that kind of stuff. So I'll look into it to see if there's any kind of fix. And I know somebody earlier in our Discord chat said maybe if we like closed our stream and then reopened it again, could, I don't know. I don't know. What to do? We're gonna try all the things and hope that it'll be better next week. I hear stomping upstairs from me. I hope it's good stomping, not funny stomping, not child stomping, because he should be in bed. Should and is are different things. Very different things. That's right. I don't know where Justin went at this moment. I'm tired. Like I said, yeah, we tried turning it off and turning it back on again. Exactly. We did that. Yes. I hope we don't have all the mics crackling. Fada, make me very sad. Computer gremlins. That's what it, yes, I'll blame it on computer gremlins, but like as I said earlier, I had my COVID vaccine yesterday and my flu vaccine and I have been suffering some immune side effects, which are totally normal. Just they're making me very tired and I didn't sleep well last night. So I am tired. But I keep saying it as if that's going to change something. I am tired. Next week is our Twisa Ween episode. I don't know if I'm ready for a Twisa Ween costume. I haven't even thought about that yet, but I guess it's the thing. I have a Halloween costume I'm working on. I don't know if it'll be ready. Will it be ready? Exactly. Hi, Paul. Nice to meet you. Hi, Paul. Nice to meet you. I don't have a Halloween to go to here. They don't do Halloween. I don't release either though. It's a Monday and I don't have children. So I have texted my friends with children to see if they want a tag along for some trick or treating, but this is part of the problem. I like didn't start assembling an outfit because I have nothing to wear it to. Well, yeah, there's also there's usually this time of year, there's there's shops that open up that are specifically geared towards providing the last minute costumes or fully constructed costumes that one could purchase. There are. Yes, one can purchase. She's never heard of this before. No, I'm sorry. I'm looking at something that's supposed to fix audio. Say it again. What did you say? Was your mind whispering while I was talking? That's exactly what was happening. I was just saying you could just go buy a costume. Oh, no. I've never done that and I never will. I could tell. I could see you just like eyes. You're talking to the person with a pile of hats in the corner. Yeah. Exactly. Wigs, hats, all the things. We've got we've got piles. Blair and I have things that can be done. So, Justin, I have something for you to try for your audio. Click on settings in StreamYard. And make sure the echo cancellation is not selected. Kai, go to bed. Yeah, go to bed. Why aren't you sleeping? I'm scientifically determined. I love you. I'll be up in a couple minutes. So my upload and download speeds, like I was having a hard time accessing stuff. But did you deselect echo cancellation just now? Just did. Yeah, just did. The crackling is gone. Was it still crackling when I came back? Yes, the whole time. Man, that sucks. That was it. So I looked it up. Crackling StreamYard, the echo cancellation can cause it. So you just deselected it. I think the crackling is gone. All right, let me redo my station. Oh, no, it's back. There's crackling again. Okay. I thought I got it. Wow. So I thought it was gone for a minute. Internet was so bad when I was trying to join. Somehow it's connected to other usage in the building. But I don't really understand. But while off, I tested it again and it was jumped up to like super fast speeds. So I'm like, aha, now it should get to go. But if it's still crackling, the next thing to check is swapping out the computer. Or browsers. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah, browsers never worked. Leaving Chrome to do anything never worked. StreamYard doesn't like to work in anything but Chrome, really. Yeah, it's true. Nothing does. New episode of Lower Decks. Well, at midnight, Fada, again. I know. It's in two hours. Yeah, we'll figure out if we can get into it a bit early next time, Justin. Maybe we can hopefully the Internet will be better and... We haven't had this as an ongoing problem, though. No, we haven't. I thought it's also weird. There was a Google Chrome update. That took place over the night. So I'm wondering if sometimes there's a weird little bit of ketchup that needs to be poured on things before they work again. All right. Hey, say good night, Blair. Good night, Blair. Say good morning, Justin. Good morning, Justin. Good night. Good night, Kiki. Good night, everyone. Thank you for joining us for our interesting adventure through science and troublesome technology this evening. We really appreciate you being here and hope you enjoyed the show. And we'll be back again next week. And we hope that you'll be here for our interview and all of that good stuff. Stay safe. Stay curious. That's what I tell you, right? Stay healthy. Stay curious. We're going to go now. Thank you. Good night.