 show for show, for show, for show podcast. You're here for the podcast. Too many. Did you come for the podcast or did you come to watch me eating dinner? Love to know. Both, every time. Like it's part of the show now, right? Wow. Identity four is- Give me a new entry. Yeah, or watch me blow my nose is the other thing. That's awesome. Or apply lipstick as you're doing it. As you're doing it. As you're doing it. Oh. All right. We are on the air, everybody. We're still punch drunk. We're hanging out in person. I know. Jet lag. I'm telling you. You can get jet lag and not leave a time zone. It's a thing. Once you're on a plane, jet lag starts. Sure. Okay, world. Let's do this podcast thing. I see identity four in the chat room. He's not right here anymore. He's up there in Seattle now. Hello, identity four. Three, two, this is twist. This week in Science, episode number 716, recorded on Wednesday, April 10th, 2019, seeing the whole thing. Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Kiki, and tonight we will fill your head with a black hole, Philippine fossils and screwy sperm, but first. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. Caution. It's that thing you use when crossing a busy intersection. That instinct to look both ways. The native navigator in your head that whispers warnings when the future seems uncertain. Ignore it for a moment. Because ahead, there are certainties that no amount of caution can prevent. Ahead, there's a journey, an adventure, and a mystery to be unveiled that no amount of hesitation can predict. Ahead, there's only discovery. Discovery that will change everything you thought you knew about the future and the past. Discovery that will challenge who we think we are and what we thought we were capable of. The sort of life-changing discovery that is never temporary and yet only possible in the present moment. And caution-free discovery is just the sort of thing we promised to provide here on This Week in Science. Coming up next. The kind of mind that can't get enough. I wanna learn everything. I wanna 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 wanna 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! Hi, Yuki and Blair. Good science to you too, Justin, Blair, and everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of This Week in Science. Aw, you guys, they're not in Portland anymore. You're important. But you're not in Portland. Yeah, you're still lucky to still be there. How did you get that gig? That's amazing. Patreon patrons, work on it. Move us up there. That's right. Bring everyone to Portland. It was sure fun last week. We had a lot of fun in the theater. What a great night. But we're back again. Burner Rose, that was a blast, yeah. So good. But this show, we keep going. So we're back again for another episode I'm really thankful that we are back because this week, the news, so much mind-blowing stuff. So let's just jump right into it. I have stories about what you know, I'm going to talk about that black hole that's just in. I've also got some really interesting autism test results. And if we get to it, some Chinese monkey brains. Yeah, it's going to be great. Justin, what'd you bring? I have just a small tiny story about an entirely new human that was discovered. That's going to be fun. A perspective on how to be of the planet, not just in it, thanks to some recently deciphered Cherokee inscriptions. And Blair, for Blair, why wanting to live longer may be completely baddie. Blair, what is in the animal corner? Well, I brought some screwy sperm, as you mentioned before. I brought some cricket dating advice and I brought the cat's meow. Looks like for those of you who are watching right now, if you're listening, you can't see this, but Blair has also brought a dog. Yes, yes, I am dog sitting. Everyone say hello to Bert. This is Bert, there's Bert. Hi, Bert. And he requires constant attention, so I relocated my laptop to the couch for the show. Very nice. Happy to oblige. Podcasting while pet sitting. All this and more on this episode of TWIS. Okay, jumping forward, if you have not subscribed to TWIS yet, why haven't you? We're everywhere you can find good podcasts and we're on YouTube and Facebook. You can find information at twis.org. Okay, let's talk about the biggest news of this or possibly last century. Like, this is huge. Yes, the finding by an international team of researchers who took, who took the earth and turned it into a telescope. But they were able to image a black hole. What? Yeah, if you, what am I talking about? I am talking about, honestly, one of the biggest physics achievements of this day and age. Einstein predicted certain consequences of relativity that should hold up, not just where we are in our part of the universe, but also at the edges of black holes. And with his theory of relativity, this is kind of one of the final tests to be able to look at a black hole and see how light behaves around it. However, black holes are big and they're far away and our, most of our telescopes were not up to the task of imaging a black hole. We have pointed the Hubble telescope in the direction of galaxies that we think contain black holes in the past, but just gotten the movement of stars around a dark area in the sky. We have seen the movement of dust and gas, the explosion of jets of material from central areas. All these things inferring that there was a black hole in a particular place. But since the telescopes haven't had quite the resolution to be able to actually look at a black hole, what the researchers did is they networked a bunch of telescopes over the surface of the Earth. And in networking all those telescopes, they were able to use inforometry to be able to create a more powerful virtual telescope. And it increased the resolution power of all of the telescopes to be on the scale of the Earth, allowing us to look much more closely at a black hole. Now, people might be thinking about other studies that we've talked about this one going on. We've even talked with researchers about this event horizon telescope that was being created. Everyone said, oh, we're going to be looking at the black hole in the center of the Milky Way galaxy. Aren't we? We're going to look at that. And the researchers did look at that black hole, Sagittarius A, at the center of our own galaxy. However, our black hole is really dynamic and there's a lot of stuff going on there, which has made it much more complex to tease out the view of the black hole itself. At this point in time, but they wanted to present what they had found. And they also looked at a black hole called M87 in a distant galaxy about 60, I think it was 60 billion light years away, really far away, and it's massive. It's an extremely massive black hole that is bigger than our solar system. It's got some 60 million suns worth of black hole. It's huge. And it's not too big. And so they were able to look at it and look at the way the light traveled around the black hole. And if you have not seen it yet, I highly recommend looking at Veritasium's video describing how the light moves around black holes. He does a great job describing it. But really, black holes, and Justin, you and I have talked about this before, they're not just a hole in space-time. You think of it like a sun or a star that's causing a spherical area of space to be affected. Now, light, if we were to shine a light from Earth directly at that black hole, it would not bounce back. Once it hit the event horizon, the gravitational pull of the black hole would suck that light right in there, and there would be nothing on our cameras. It'd be like, where'd the light go? There's nothing there. And that's where we're on the other side of it. Not necessarily. So if you shoot light around the edge of the event horizon, it will be pulled around the backside of the black hole and then that light will return and be affected by the gravitational pull of that black hole. And so what they ended up seeing in this inforometry when they pointed their telescopes, this virtual telescope at this point in space is not the black hole itself, but rather a ring of light from all these photons traveling around the black hole and coming back out the other side so that we can see them illuminating dust and gas and other things in the area nearby. And so in any sense, this is a momentous achievement. The researchers have said that they call what we see a shadow. And it is a shadow in a sense in that there's a black area in the middle, but if you look at the image of the black hole, it is something of a reddish ring with a black disc in the center and that reddish ring is what the shadow is. It's not the accretion disc. It is actually a light shadow, this shadow that is being scattered by the gravitational forces of the black hole and by looking at that light shadow, we could determine the mass and the gravitational field and the exact event horizon for this particular black hole. So amazing. It is so amazing. People have, we've talked before, like have we ever seen a black hole? And we've seen stuff around black holes, but we haven't seen a black hole until now. Now people will forever know what a black hole looks like. And the next step is to continue studying this, but also to continue with the algorithms and the data parsing for our view of Sagittarius A, the black hole, the center of our universe. If you've seen the movie Interstellar, if you could, there's a vision of what a black hole would look like that was advised on by physicists who work on black holes. And they said, if you're going to make the black hole, this is what it needs to look like based on Einstein's theory of general relativity. This is what light's going to do when it travels around it. And if we could increase the resolution on this view of a black hole that we have, it would look very similar to the image from the movie. So this might be a silly question, but... Not silly questions. I'm having trouble figuring out. So what a camera would see and what our eyes would see if we were in front of it ourselves, is that the same or is that different? So with a camera, this is what cameras, these radio telescopes that are taking in electromagnetic information, they're your cameras. And this is light information, and that is what our eyes would see as well. There would be a dark area surrounded by light that could be perceived. And it's dark in the middle because it absorbs everything. Yes. Yeah. It may be somewhat in the... There are probably going to be differences when and if we ever actually get close to one of these things. But at this point in time, the idea that we see this light and there's this dark area that we don't see, that dark area says everything. That dark area is all the information. And there's a little bit more information there too because there's a brighter side in this photograph, if you will, of this black hole that we know we're catching a bit on the edge of its rotation. And so that brighter bit you see down below is sort of telegraphing the angle at which the rotation of the black hole is in relationship to us. If we were seeing it from a proper profile of that rotation, you would expect that glow to be equal all the way around. Yes, absolutely. But if we're seeing it a bit on the edge, in the darker side... And I really like this picture. This is amazing. It looks like a cat eye kind of. It does. I mean, some people are trying to say it's like the eye of Sauron. I think we've got other images that are closer to that in space. But this is... It is a little... This is an eye into black holes, an eye into space. This is something that will now define for everyone from this point forward what a black hole looks like. That picture might end up in a textbook. It will end up in a textbook. And for all of those humans who are within earshot, who he looked at a black hole? I know. We're at that point in history and the planet of science is in Sauron. And my favorite part of this also is not just that we looked at a black hole but that we turned our planet into a telescope to do it. Yeah, that part is out of control. Oh, clever humans. You never fail to impress. Let's also... I'm gonna... Let's go to who did the science as well and how the press conference was done. The credit was given to the scientists who did the work and one of the astronomers who created this image is a 29-year-old assistant professor woman. And I apologize because I did not have time before the show to put in my notes an image to share on this video podcast or time to put her exact name and where she's from and what she did. She devised... Three years ago, devised the algorithm to link this data together to be able to create this image. Yeah. And there's also some great work out there. The Chandra X-ray Observatory also observed this black hole at a similar time that the Event Horizon telescope was looking and so they've got some really neat factors of scale imagery that are out there. So this is going to fill our imaginations and our conversations for some time to come. That's awesome. It's amazing. We saw a black hole. Humanity. You rock. Let's all come together. Cosmic perspective. We can do something that's just awesome and awe-inspiring to see these things. I want to see more now. Let's get more. More, more, more. Moving on from that though, let's talk about autism. So, Justin, I believe you brought a story a couple of years ago about some researchers who attempted fecal transplants on children with autism. Yes. Yes. Well, the results of that study are out. Yes. And they're amazing. The study published in scientific reports called Long-term Benefit of Microbiota Transfer Therapy and Autism Symptoms and Gut Microbiota. These are from Arizona State University researchers and they effectively demonstrated that the results that they talked about two years ago, which were short-term results and they said, well, we did a fecal transplant. We saw that there was a difference in the gut microbiota of autistic children versus children without autism. And as many of our stories end, when we tell about this stuff, more research is needed. Yes. And thankfully, in this case, more research was done. It was done. They kept the study going and in this so that the children had less microbial diversity in their guts than children without autism and there were fewer benevolent or good bacteria also than there were not so good bacteria. And so they did the fecal transplant two years ago and saw, hey, it changed their gut microbiota and some of the parents said it looks like their behaviors are changing and some of their symptoms are less. Two years later all of the family, and this is a long-term study, all of the families reported in, all of the families kept going. Nobody dropped out of the study, which is almost unheard of for long-term studies. They found a 45% reduction in core autism spectrum disorder symptoms, language, social interaction, and behavior at two years post-treatment compared to before treatment. Wow. So they were getting better. Not just that they improved right after, but over the last two years the children got even better. Their symptoms were lessened even more and the gut microbial change that they saw was fairly well maintained. Just the fact how much your gut is connected to everything else in your body is just every day, every week, I feel like we're learning more and more where when you go in for your annual checkup the first thing is going to be to check out your microbiome and to go from there because it is all related. And this is a huge, huge thing that if you can make things a little bit easier just by adjusting your gut bacteria. Right. And this is the reason that they went into this idea was also that microbes are more and more implicated in that but also that autistic children very often have gut problems that there are digestive system issues in general leaky gut and other things. And this is where a lot of links between dietary changes and other efforts have played in to autism treatments. So there's another link that's sort of outside of this study that I find interesting as well, which is that the other end of what is typically found in the autistic spectrum is parents or other, the other the same genes but other aspect of it is people who can handle large volumes of information very efficiently. So there has been correlation between autistic children and parents who are doctors or involved in information technology and this sort of a thing. So that the the fact that none of the parents dropped out of reporting on the study probably is correlated to the fact that whatever their professions are allows them to maintain a financial stability to keep participating in the study because massive life changes don't prevent them from being able to keep being involved. So there I don't know if you didn't follow it. So there tends to be a wealth associated with information handling. Oh sure. Yeah. And that allows what might be correlated to being able to continue to participate and report to a study who along with everything else that life throws at you. It's outside of the study but I think that's an interesting side thing to this. But we don't know that for sure. You don't know. No, but we do know for sure that for instance Palo Alto at the height of the information age was also a hot spot for autism. We know that it seems to run in families of doctors and people involved in IT and people who have been in that industry. It has a connection to information handling upon that spectrum that's very fascinating. So it's a study within a study that hasn't been done and I'm correlating but speculating. Yeah. What we do. But with the study itself the only aspect here is that not just there is a 45% decrease in symptoms compared to baseline at the start of the study, 83% of participants were rated as severe autism at the end of the study only 17% were severe. Wow, that is transformational. 39% were mild moderate and 44% were below the cutoff mild. So now we have to also ask there's a follow up to this. This is a small study. This is promising. Who was the fecal source? Who was the what was the fecal source that we all should be transplanting that had that Well, but see it's dependent on who you are is the No, but it's this is the thing too. It's just like it's at the very this is what the cutting edge of science looks like we have a result we don't understand it. Yeah. It's good. There's something good there. We got an amazing result. We have no idea why we have a lot of discovery ahead. This is what cutting edge looks like. You have beginning and you have end and you like what you have. You have to figure out what's going on in the middle that's making that happen. They're going to be looking at trying to get a larger sample size get more individuals involved. There were particular interventions that that helped to transform this empty empty tea. They call it as a therapeutic for autism spectrum. And in terms of where they're going next, they do know that they have given particular dosing and time frame for the treatment to the patients already and they're going to be working on dosing and duration to see if they can get even better benefits for different people that maybe some individuals need booster treatments where others didn't. I have a question. I don't know if you have the information about dosing and duration. Do you have that or not? Because my curiosity is about how well the microbiome transformed. Did it self-sustain or did they require continual dosing, if you will? It wasn't continual. They pre-treated individuals with vancomycin which is an antibiotic to kill. They did a bowel cleanse a stomach acid suppressant and then the fecal microbiota transfer daily for 7 to 8 weeks. It was 10 weeks of treatment total. Oh, and that's it. It's hard stop and 2 years later we're still saying wow. Yeah. Oh, that's amazing. So I guess we don't know yet, right? If this if the microbiome is directly related to autism or if being on the autism spectrum makes you extra susceptible to irritation from gut issues. Right, so we don't know causality. And this does not indicate causality in any way. What it indicates is that it is a potential for treatment and that is all that it indicates and as we said we still need more study. But this is very promising. Very neat. Yeah, either way. Very good to know. Very good. And I am going to correct myself and answer the question the woman I was trying to talk about in the previous story about the black hole Katie Baumann from the California Institute of Technology. She's an assistant professor in the CMS department. She was a postdoctoral fellow with the event of a black hole telescope at an MIT grad. And it was like actually, we don't need this telescope but we need an algorithm. I got it. I got this. Nice. We got some great science being done. This is this week in science. Justin, what did you bring? Oh, yeah. So from one mind-blowing set of stories to another is a term that we've used a few times mentioned a bit on the show as an analogy for human evolution. But before I get into that, here's the dictionary dot com definition just so we can because I don't think we've done this. What we meet, what is meant by braided stream? Because it's the actual thing. Braided stream a stream consisting of multiple small shallow channels that divide and recombine numerous times transforming a pattern resembling the strands of a braid. Braided streams form where the sediment load is so heavy that some of the sediments are deposited as shifting islands or bars between the channels. So following the analogy downstream a little bit we can sort of picture humanity throughout the ages as the waters that are going and braiding and as these little island sandbars that appear within these braids as specific species of humans that existed at certain times or places depending on how the gene flow of the streams merged and moved on. Hopefully that provided a picture of what braided stream means in terms of evolution and while in most contexts we speak of humans as being the humans, the current humans, us as we like to refer to ourselves, we know that there were many more experiments in humanity than just us. And that many of these were actually living on the planet at the same time. We've got to sort of run it down a short list. Neanderthals, Denisovans some of whom we've just learned that might not even be Denisovans but might need to get renamed something else. Homo floreansis, that's the little hobbit people Homo naledi, those are the cave dwelling hominids. Homo erectus was even around concurrent with a lot of this not to mention red deer cave people who are still trying to figure out what where and how they fit in and we need to find some more about that mystery there. And of course us, right? That's about eight hominids depending on how you count it on the planet at the same time. And now something else has been added to the mix. A new player on the field, eh? Human Nine! That's like Planet Nine! International team of researchers uncovered remains of new species of human in the Philippines just not far from Indonesia where Homo floreansis was found. The new species which I'm reading and have not heard pronounced yet so I might be getting this wrong so ensis named after Vuzon Island they found a 50,000 year old fossils which consist of not a whole lot yet they've got some an adult finger toe bones they've got teeth a child's femur so they have elements of this hominin that are distinct enough to be a new hominin. So part of the problem is they can't quite tell like this is a professor Piper of the Australian National University says the findings represent a major breakthrough which is obvious now in our understanding of human evolution but he also goes on to say the size of the teeth generally they're not always reflect the overall body size of a mammal so we think Homo Luzonensis is probably small exactly how small we don't know yet we would need to find some skeletal elements from which we could measure body size more precisely so really an awesome discovery so the extremities hands, feet are remarkably Australopithecine like that's a really ancient human 2 million years ago human to be finding elements of in the Philippines 50,000 years ago also intriguing is the Callow Cave where they found this near there they had previously found rhinoceros rendering rhinoceros that had been chopped up with stone tools that discovery was dated at about 700,000 years ago so this isn't just we have just found the physical evidence of a recent which also coincides pretty decently with the time when we know the current modern humans were traveling to this region we now have and in time frame of we also have for Homo Floriansis the Hobbit people we have some evidence of them 700,000 years ago there looks like there was stone tool use 700,000 years ago butchering rhinoceroses in the Philippines which is also just by itself interesting that there were rhinoceroses in the Philippines even if you forget the rest of the story that by itself is significant so yeah new humans this is also fascinating we talk about like you said the braided stream all the time all the time but quite often but it's still shocking that there could have been even more diversity like oh wait so what's going on now there's only one but is it because part of why we're only one is we think because we're all of them because we think we're all of them well and we found we've learned sense this is the adding to the story is that we find that a lot of humans have Neanderthals and we find that a lot of Neanderthals were also part of Denisovan some humans have some Denisovan and then there's some combo overlap there so it's where well most humans are current human, Neanderthal and Denisovan and you know until we actually get code from Homo Nalati, Homo Floriansis and this new one we don't know what part we are of them because we couldn't directly see what that contribution was so the more we discover these ancient other humans in 700,000 years Neanderthal was a significant enough of a discovery to find that there was a 400,000 year cousin that we intermingled with again this is twice almost the age of Neanderthal in difference and persisted and coexisted with the current modern human. Yeah but part of it is that it was an island and so there's this huge overturning of thought about humans evolving on islands and very similar to Homo Floriansis is that this Homo Luzonensis is shorter in stature smaller more diminutive and that this smaller size could be that kind of not dwarfism necessarily but this this evolution on island evolution based on limited resources or limited range Certainly and Homo Floriansis was very much connected to as a potential dwarfism of Homo erectus this is going back further and saying a 2 million year old hominin might have made it to the Philippines and encountered island dwarfism over that span of time and they were larger got stuck on a log ended up on an island and then shrank and then may have concurrently coexisted with our vision of current modern humans and because we don't yet have because this is a recent discovery we just found that we don't yet know whether or not that fed back into the current chain flow like this is there's so many amazing stories within this one discovery Blair you say it probably did but if it was an isolated island population species then it did not necessarily Not to maybe the largest of groups but you also have the older evolutionary group potentially would have but not that more recent Luzonensis Yeah I guess that's my question is when were modern humans first found in the Philippines? Approximately probably in that range of about 50,000 years ago is when we started hitting those regions so that's why this is interesting because forget everything else about the story but just know that there's two hominins on an island nowhere else to go nobody else to dance with and try to tell me that something didn't happen Right so maybe you know we need some updates to their 23andMe profile pretty soon We're going to start adding No this is true we're going to start adding a lot to the 23andMe that people might not have suspected could have possibly been there There you go Amazing And also that the Guinness Book of World Records smallest demon is either from the Philippines or Indonesia it's somewhere in that region I'm just saying It's I'm not saying it's connected but it's probably connected I'm not saying it's connected It's speculation You know what I think it's time for right now What's it time for? Blair's Animal Corner With Blair? Except for Giant What you got Blair? Oh my goodness this is like a return to the Blair's Animal Corner of old I have a story about mating and I have a story about sperm So part of the course on the animal corner So this first story all about sperm brings a new meaning to the term of getting screwed That is because this is all about bird sperm shaped like a screw This is from PhD student at University of Oslo PhD's Hannah Nyborg Stu Stod I got a little lesson before we started thank you very much in how to pronounce that O with the slash in the middle She wanted to look at the peculiar spiral shape of songbird sperm She looked at 36 bird species from house sparrows to tree swallows looking at sperm shapes In particular quite a few of them had spiral or corkscrew shape sperm And they also happened to have a very high average swimming speed Those species also tended to have high rates of abnormal or damaged sperm So the first part of this study was published in the journal evolution in July 2018 That was looking at the speed of screw shaped sperm But what just was published this week was the adjoining article looking at the association between sperm shape and sperm damage So looking at these two studies together it looks like there is a tradeoff between swimming speed and robustness of sperm This tradeoff could help biologists to understand why there are so many sperm shapes There are thousands of shapes of sperm in the animal kingdom Why? They really just have one job and they've had it forever So why would there be this vast vast difference? Wouldn't you expect that over evolutionary time there would be a sperm that came about that was so good at its job that's just how sperm was Streamlining Absolutely So back in the class I have a question So I don't know a whole lot of fun animal facts But and you correct me if I'm wrong But it ducks This has nothing to do with their appendage Right That's like the obvious question This has nothing to do with the noodley appendage This has more to do The intermediary organ is not involved with this Yeah, the intermediary organ Is that just total I'm supposed to say it's totally random So there's an answer to that in this story just so The reason that the sperm is corkscrew shaped it would appear They figured this out by collaborating with mathematicians which I love like hey call it the math department and go you want to help me figure out the sperm thing So they took physical factors such as drag, viscosity and size and modeled all these different types of sperm shapes and found that the screw shaped sperm cells moved forward when they spin So it says if they are drilling into female fluid so the fluid that the sperm has to move through to reach the egg is viscous enough and thick enough and sperm is so tiny that they actually really struggle to move through this heavy fluid So they are they are screwing through this thicker fluid through the female canal to get to the egg So in this case that is why that's happening with the ducks that you were asking about before the female organ is also shaped like the male's intermediary organ So that is just a shape matching system so that's totally different This looks like it's a fluid dynamics question So in fact that was in birds. So is it just ducks that have that morphology? That's a great question that I don't have the answer to They are the most famous for that But we can dive into that question in the after show perhaps But in this case with the sperm they are drilling through this liquid to get to the egg faster But where this gets interesting is that the screw shaped sperm is in fact known to abnormality and damage This study was not able to figure out why The best guess so far is that it's somehow related to oxidative damage because sperm cells in particular are very prone to oxidative damage which leads to abnormalities that have been observed in previous studies But there is no there's no known reason that a shape would affect oxidative damage yet So that's where the more research comes in. What we do know for sure now is that in these animals that they were looking at in these birds the spiral shape the screw shaped sperm is faster but more susceptible to damage which is why you end up with this huge kind of rainbow of types of sperm in the animal kingdom because you are trying to it looks like this is a real pro con It's a race for the winner Right, so is it better to have more sperm that is more fast or more durable? Do you want a select number of really good sperm or do you want lots of sperm? Yeah, and this goes back to the study from a few weeks ago about the sperm that was didn't you have a study on old sperm not the ram sperm that was reinvigorated that was frozen for 50 years that was a cool story but there was another story that discovered that there was a difference between really old sperm and younger sperm in their viability Yes, the dad was older Yeah, the the specimen creating the sperm as he got older the sperm was not as good quality Yeah, so there's all these questions of cost benefit and weighing pros and cons What is it that you need for this particular strategy? There was another study that I will just mention in passing this week about the testy size versus ornamental elements in primates and that there was a direct trade off there Do you need more Do you need larger testies because there is sperm competition happening or do you need ornamentation because there is direct competition for mate access happening So in the animal kingdom you have this set resource amount you have the set energy amount you have these set parameters of what you have to work with and where you allocate those resources can be very different for different species because there are different challenges for different species And it all comes down to those costs and the benefits and how does the balance play out? Where are you going to use those resources? Speaking of balance and resources this leads in perfectly to my next story which is all about the cricket dating scene So this is from University of Exeter I love this study because looking at nine years of demographic and behavioral data from wild populations of the annual field cricket gylous campestrus I don't know if it's a hard G or a soft G but the field cricket in nine years of this data they were looking at these animals in the wild and they wanted to look at ratios of males to females in a given season mating season next to the rate of aging of the males So even though crickets don't live very long they only live a few weeks they still experience physical decline as that time passes So the question is do you age faster or slower when there are more females around now there's a leading theory about this across the animal kingdom are they are they particularly like nagging or like this are they particularly friendly to be around like are they chill chicks or are they like you know really pain anyway the leading theory for why animals fall apart as we get old is that we use up our energy on reproduction instead of bodily maintenance so is this use it or lose it scenario the main life here is to procreate so knowing that you're going to use up all of your energy as time wears thin trying to procreate as much as you can so that's kind of the main theory if that theory was right you would expect that animals have to compete more for females they should age faster therefore if there's more females would they age faster or slower they would age slower because they would have less competition there would be more females to pick from they wouldn't have to compete so so savagely for a group of females so the population of critics in this crickets in the Spanish meadow they they studied this where years varied in the number of males and females in the ratio they found that battling with rivals is more of a drain on males than mating with more females so their mating success increased when they had more females and it looks like their competition decreased so deterioration with age was measured by how much the males chirped which was the direct measure of how a cricket is doing because they do that to attract females and warn off rivals so if they're chirping that means they're still feeling good enough to mate which means they're less fragile and they feel chirpy right they're feeling chirpy in years with equal numbers of males and females males experienced rapid decline in chirping but when females outnumbered males there was no decline at all man if you want to live longer surround yourself by a bunch of women no actually it's cut down on competition is what that's really about so if you want to totally extrapolate this to the human condition which I would not suggest because it's crickets I would say the stress of competition so you have to find a way to reduce yourself to reduce the stress in your life that's what this is about ultimately and if you're a cricket the number one stressor is trying to get that mate in the three weeks that you live so my extrapolation here that's three weeks that's it that's all a cricket that's a short short life yeah but as in most animal stress conversations that we have stress is really really powerful and this is just another source of stress in the animal kingdom you know how I am looking forward to getting rid of some of my stress continuing on with the show we are done with the first half the second half is coming with many more stories I've got Chinese brains the second half I know Justin's got some more stories Blair as well more stories coming back after these messages thank you for listening to twist we appreciate you being a part of our show we appreciate you bringing us into your lives every week if you would like to help support twist there are several ways you can do that besides listening to the show and telling your friends about us first you can head over to twist.org 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time in the shower but I enjoy a nice shower her theory is that we shouldn't waste energy but my supposition is that if I'm enjoying it maybe it's not a waste it's hard to know what to feel without data though a friend of mine told me that I should just look at my gas meter and see how much gas I was using for the hot water you know I did that but knowing how many cubic meters of natural gas I burned didn't give me any intuition about if it was a lot or not apologies for the metric measurements here you don't have to apologize Shane this is a science program it's certainly easier for calculations I also live in the Netherlands instead of a camel force per cubic or however you measure natural gas at residences in the USA these days that quick search was not super helpful but I did find out that natural gas is mostly methane and has a mass of about 0.7 to 0.9 kilograms per cubic meter I realized that I remembered enough high school chemistry to figure out that methane CH4 has a mass of about 16 and carbon dioxide CO2 about 44 so I could do some simple multiplication and figure out how many kilograms of carbon dioxide I was emitting per shower a little more math that turns out that when I shower daily it emits about 210 kilograms of carbon dioxide in a year putting that into perspective that's about the same as burning 105 liters of gasoline or as Justin would say about 105,000 milliliters of gasoline something like 28 gallons for Americans anyway, thanks to science I can now shower it guilt free without care for my carbon footprint well, if not exactly guilt free at least with an amount of guilt put into the proper's perspective and that's what science has done for me lately you can also just circumvent this entire issue put a solar panel on your roof and use solar power for your shower so you can even reduce even more guilt and put a gray water system in your house so that you're using your shower water for other things then you're really not hurting anybody by taking a long shower look at all these productive responses see, there are solutions to everything perspective is very important but gaining additional perspectives is good as well but I think a lot of us many people I don't know exactly but I think many people don't consider how much energy it takes to heat their hot water to take a shower so if you take a 5 minute shower versus a 30 minute shower not only how much water are you using but how much energy are you using during that difference in those two showers and it can add up over time depending on how much you like those long hot showers absolutely, yeah but I like the solar idea you don't even necessarily need a solar panel it just could be a system that uses solar energy to thermally heat the water I have a solar shower for camping that uses that yeah but I think also it's a good reminder that in the scientific community we're starting to recognize that these tiny things like turning off the lights it's better than nothing but it's not enough to turn the tide on big big problems it's those larger things that we have to tackle that actually is going to make a difference and that's exactly what science social science has done for me personally in my conservation education realm is recognizing that I'm not the bad guy for talking about climate change and also driving a car that's just a recognition that there's a system that's failing there and we need to work on the system it's not me as an individual that's messing up yeah so you can like your shower you can like your car but maybe we should get rid of the the gas based energy system maybe we should get rid of the gas and for other energy I mean you can have an electric yeah you can have an electric water heater where does that electricity come from can it be solar, water, wind a reusable renewable resource yeah there's a great graphic about telling people telling people to be environmentalists by swimming upstream is not going to get everybody on board you need to change the direction of the stream so everyone can move with the water together in the right direction that was very deep yeah only if you're in the middle of the stream anyhow true true if you would like to send in your own what has science done for me lately response send me an email kirsten at thisweekinscience.com or send me a message on our facebook page facebook.com slash thisweekinscience there we are there kirsten what story are you going to talk about now so this is researchers who have recently interpreted Cherokee inscriptions in manateau cave in alabama these are inscriptions that took place during the trail of tears so this was a massive time of crisis for the Cherokees who were being displaced from lands that they had occupied for millennia the voice of Jan Simic president emeritus of the University of Tennessee system distinguished professor of sciences department of anthropology these are the first Cherokee inscriptions ever found in a cave context in the first from a cave to be translated talking stones Cherokee salubian manateau cave in alabama they tell us about what the people who wrote on the walls were doing in the cave and provide a link to how some Native Americans viewed caves as sacred places so part of it is a description of what is referred to as a ceremonial event what we would in modern terms put into context of sports they had a game that was very much like lacrosse with a stick and like a puckball kind of a thing and and it's sort of interesting one of the transcriptions kind of speaks to the level of sport that took place in 1828 we who are those that have blood come out of their nose and mouth so this was not yeah not wow this was a game of fierce competition but there's another aspect of this there's a ceiling inscription written into the stone that is written backwards and this is simic again part of the inscription which reads I am your grandson written backwards into the stone and the takeaway from this is that the Cherokee who inscribed this was talking to the earth as if it was a predecessor and writing it backwards so that it could be legible from within the earth I found this to be just an incredibly powerful perspective on how they viewed their place being of the earth and not simply here in it or on it but writing it so that the earth could read it from its perspective anyway an incredible find and a this was also to get to the point of a transcription there were scholars from the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in the United Ketua Band of Cherokees and the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma who contributed to being able to give a proper transcription to these cave writings which is not a typical Native American thing too it was it was in a time of sort of being uprooted from that ancestral land and there is also another aspect of it is writing something in stone is also sort of seeking a bit of permanence that this message will be you know immortalized while everything else is in flux transition and chaos so a couple of really important lessons wrapped up in this otherwise simple language translation that was discovered what an important find but just bringing also snapshots of that historical time that giving us insight into the real people that were there that's something incredible thinking about memories this doesn't have to do with memories from the earth this is memories in our brains as we all know as we get older memory starts to falter somewhat well today not today actually April 8th sorry about that April 8th researchers published a study in which they used transcranial stimulation with electrical current on older brains and they got those brains to improve their working memory to the age of say 20 year olds so this study looked at 42 people aged 18 to 29 years old and 42 people aged 60 to 76 they compared working memory tasks in the different age groups and found that older individuals were slower and less accurate at remembering things based on that working memory recall they also didn't identify little differences between pictograms little pictures when you look at those two pictures what things are the same what things are different they also had a harder time finding those differences they also found looking at brain activity that the older group had less synchronization of the frontal and temporal cortices and we've talked about on the show previously that there's this emerging hypothesis that there needs to be electrical synchronization that the frequency of firing of the neurons in these different areas of the brain has to be synchronized for them to work together and for them to act well together in this memory formation type of way or memory or recall they used what is called TAX which is transcranial alternating current stimulation for 25 minutes on all the individuals they found that nothing really changed in the 20 year olds that stimulating the brains of the 20 year olds didn't have an effect on synchronization it didn't have an effect on their working memory they were still just 20 year olds however the group that was 60 to 76 years old they synchronization between their frontal and temporal cortices improved and along with that improvement there were also benefits improvements to the working memory tasks and also the finding the differences in the pictures task which is something I want to be able to do when I get older so sign me up so this is like getting your wheels aligned in your car it's just like recalibrating but can you feel it when they do this yeah but not bad it's like slight electrical stimulation it's electrical stimulation it's probably a little tingly but 25 minutes feels like a long time seems like it would but I mean you do other things sometimes 25 minutes I mean what if you were able to do the stimulation while you sat and read a book or watch television or did some other task and it was just like time to put my thinking cap on and you just did that the researchers are interested in the idea that this kind of treatment could help to reduce some of the limitations of aging but also they're really interested in how it could improve aspects of age related dementia and something that we have also talked about on the show before related to frequency of firing is an Alzheimer's treatment that uses light at a particular a strobe light at a particular frequency that seems to improve cognitive function in Alzheimer's patients in this study with the tax stimulation that it helped for a while and the effect lasted for almost an hour but then disappeared and so it wasn't a lasting effect it helped the the older brains act younger for a short period of time but then they couldn't hold on to that synchronization that something has already happened that the neurons are like that I don't want to talk to you anymore I know what you're going to say I've heard it all before but if you did it for an hour would it last longer but what I'm wondering also is we don't really know how the that light stimulation is improving Alzheimer's patients with which also does not seem to be an effect that lasts it's something that when they when they treat with the the strobe light there seems to be an improvement in Alzheimer's symptoms for a short period of time but then it that dissipates as well so maybe what's going on is the light is in training neuronal firing that allows synchronization which is alleviating some of these symptoms in Alzheimer's and this is direct electrical activation going bam you guys talk to each other so maybe one is direct and one is indirect in a sense I don't know but this is some I'm wondering if this is something that could be linked the interesting result the issue with this one is that 25 minutes for an hour of benefit that's not a very good cost benefit right sitting around for 25 minutes for an hour depending on how good that hour is it might work so here I'm imagining I'm you know going on 80 and I know I have to hang out with a bunch of 20 year olds right you're like having lunch or something I'm going to prep I'm going to stimulate my brain but then you're like Cinderella at midnight as soon as your hour is up I'm going to get slow you're like what's your name again uh oh I gotta go oh yeah I mean this doesn't get at what will uh keep brains from losing that synchronous activity in the first place and then is there a diminishing diminishing in turns like if you do this over and over again is it less and less effective over time or more effectiveness because otherwise just put it in a hat I wear it all the time a big flowery bonnet yeah or a fedora like what's a fedora Justin I love it I love it I like it better every every old person's wearing a flowery bonnet male or female you're like oh I just thought it looked nice but how's your husband Gerald and your daughter it's Christine and your dog like you got it all right sadly it's just listing names you just don't stop listing names of people who are associated with that person it just becomes a really relevant conversation so but this is important if we are going to figure out a way to live longer yeah I mean if we want to live longer we want to live longer better we don't want to start our cognitive decline at 60 to 70 to 80 years old because of this desynchronous activity and then live to be 200 that's not gonna work out very well yeah so this is the kind of thing that you would want to stop but the whole thing the whole idea of living longer is completely batty to begin with not so much yeah no it is absolutely Accorded University of Maryland researchers who analyzed the evolutionary tree of bats and found that a majority of bat species they looked at the DNA of majority of bat species and found four lineages that exhibit extreme longevity now this is extreme longevity in terms of bats so there's this correlation apparently between mammals, their size and their longevity we humans are pretty large mammals and we have a lot of other things going for us that allow us to get to these 70, 80, 90 year lifespans elephants 70 years is completely achievable orcas can be healthy, happy 50, 60 years old there's a lot of large mammals that can exhibit longevity if you happen to be see a field mouse your longevity is in the neighborhood of three years and with a reasonable graph of size of two longevity we find correlation pretty solid however this is according Gerald Wilkinson a biology professor at University of Maryland lead author of this paper that was published today however if we lived as long as bats adjusted for size human lifespans would be 240 years yes so why did these animals live so long why are they beating the system they looked they tried to figure this out so the work described in the research paper concluded that horseshoe bats, long-eared bats common vampire bats and at least one other lineage of mouse-eared bats lived four times longer than other similarly sized mammals they also found that high latitude home range and larger males than females could also be used to give a sort of predictive correlation to lifespan so this is a quotey voice of Wilkinson scientists are very interested in finding closely related species in which one is long lived and one is short lived because it implies that there has been some recent change to allow one species to live longer so this body provides multiple cases of closely related species with varying longevity which gives us many opportunities to make comparisons, look for underlying mechanism that allows species to live longer so they have what you could essentially say is the similar code of genetics within these species and you have these outliers of longevity and then you can sort of look and compare between these and see is there is there a segment of code is there a segment of genetic change between these and that's a very easy thing at least to narrow down to pretty darn quickly so this is a fascinating fascinating specimen of subject to study within these bats so researchers found that hibernating species located more extreme latitudes live longer than those closer to the equator Wilkinson said the researchers can't say for sure how latitude is actually impacting longevity mechanism is missing but their study suggests it may have to do with these bats ability to lower their temperature yeah so that's how they make sense is the hibernation thing when you lower your body temperature you lower your metabolism that and you also lower your ability to have stress because you're like hey I'm sleeping yes and we know that hibernation is an excellent opportunity to heal and that animals actually can lengthen their telomeres during hibernation which would make perfect sense there and one of the bats which is sort of the outlier is the vampire bat which they're saying here at least the vampire bat is very unusual for a mammal in that it can let its body temperature rise and fall dramatically throughout the day so it's almost as if the vampire bat's basically a reptile right but yeah kind of but it's also like I don't know I saw it as like it can go through a mini hibernation state in a sense on a daily like I'm not going to spend 3 months doing this part of the day I'm going to go into this state and I'm going to spring back like activate it noon hibernate at night yeah and because not all adaptations extend life spans some actually shorten them being able to have this wide range within bats should help us narrow down those elements, those mechanisms that are actually important for longevity interesting and if we figure it out we may be hibernating to live longer lives let's go over 200 years since leaf all the time I like it why are you staying alive just this leaf is awesome going back and forth it's torpor is that am I saying it right yeah hibernation is a really hard thing to achieve yeah torpor is this sort of state somewhere in between like just having a good night's sleep and actually hibernating it's not quite having a good night's sleep but it's it's adjusting your metabolic rate for sure yeah and if there were some way for humans to take on the traits of other animals you know far be it from researchers to give other animals the traits of humans uh oh well here come the Chinese again with with a very provocative study out of out of Kunming Institute of Zoology and the researcher who led the effort being Sue a geneticist has taken uh taken human genes for brain development and transgenically inserted them into macaque monkeys this human gene is suspected to play a role in human intelligence now Dr. Sue the geneticist who led this study is known for looking into the genetics of evolutionary traits and so the basis of this question is at some point humans brains started growing and we got smarter what happened what genes did we get how did we change from the ancestors to who we are now what lead what genes led the change and so what better thing to do then take some human brain genes and put them in macaque monkeys so so my prediction is this this study fails to produce a more intelligent macaque let me tell you what the results of the study are before you do let me can I throw out my why I think why I think and and and it's because one of the one of the theories at least on how humans became more intelligent was the fact that we ran bipedally everywhere right it's that whole forcing more blood mechanical pump of a one idea no no it is blood so you can you can you can just mullish it at the end of this if this is not how the study comes out because I haven't seen this and over time that little mechanical pump pushed blood up to the brain and also the channels the blood the veins and the channels through which the base of the skull blood was allowed to flow to the brain increase so my prediction would be regardless of the genes that you change if you haven't gone through the hard work of evolving higher blood flow to the brain you shouldn't see a realizable effect right so is it going to turn a monkey into a human no but this is why they also didn't choose to do this study in higher primates they chose to do the study in a more distantly related animal the monkey which is still fairly closely related but distantly enough that they didn't think it would make a difference anyhow the research generated 11 monkeys and 5 of them survived they gave brain measurements and discovered that each of the monkeys have between 2 and 9 copies of this human gene in their in their brains and the and the monkeys had increased rate of brain development as they as they developed and leading to larger brains than monkeys that did not have the gene inserted and also slightly higher scores on behavioral tests of intelligence so it did work however did they have bigger skulls and increased blood flow like I'm quite not quite so it's still a small sample size this is 5 out of 11 which isn't even 50% we have monkeys performing a little better on test behavioral tests and not even and having a few copies of the gene but not necessarily having everything that we need and is when you talk about transgenic insertions is that gene throughout the brain or is it in all the DNA or is it in just little bits and pieces the researcher says that for sure the small number of animals is a limitation but they're not there's a solution more monkeys and they're testing other brain evolution genes he's looking at another gene called SIRGAP2C in a variant arising 2 million years ago just when Australopithecus was leaving the scene and making way for early humans and this particular gene has been called or moving the Philippines and the gene has been called the Humanity Switch and the missing genetic link for its role in the emergence of human intelligence early on however just because it's been found in fossils and modern humans fossil DNA and modernized humans but we don't know what the results are going to be however researchers researchers also looked at the monkeys that they had inside MRI machines and they found that the transgenic monkeys actually didn't have the brains developed faster than other monkeys but they didn't actually have larger brains there was no overcrowding of the skull until you increase the skull size and the blood flow, having a big brain will not help it would be like a constant concussion it would be like a terrible situation but they did do better on a short term memory quiz which is why I was very like I was going to say I'm utterly skeptical of the result the idea that the development portion of it could increase that the pace of development could increase with this gene influx that's much more believable to me than that there could be an overall increase intelligence based on the gene without a complete infrastructure behind it so I'm less skeptical of their result based on that it's interesting however there were many collaborators from around the world and this was first this study was first published in national science review it's a Beijing journal reported by Chinese media and now western scientists including one collaborator have stepped back from it and are calling the experiment reckless and question its ethics and whether or not we should be genetically modifying primates at all should we and the question now though is is the cat out of the bag or are researchers just upset that China has taken the lead in this area of research where they are not as limited as other countries in the steps that they take in genetic experimentation so I guess with some of these kind of like gray area studies usually I feel like there's a very clear reason or goal and for this one I understand they're trying to find this missing link right of intelligence but in terms of what you would do with that information that's the part that I'm missing oh no no massive implications for for assisting humans in their own like development of disabled humans perhaps so this is something that you might recognize if you identify it it may be missing in certain humans you can create all have all sorts of theoretical and everything else so it's a fascinating thing I think but I like your take on it my walk back of why people are walking back might be more along the lines of I was really interested in this study so I participated in it and then I found out I might have repercussions at home in terms of being able to get grants so I need to walk it back just so I can stay within the safety of the legal construct of the country I come from having nothing to do with the research that's more what I kind of heard from the necessity of walking back I studied you were initially for got a result from and then realized oh we published I didn't think I thought we were just doing research I didn't think we were publishing I didn't know anyone was going to hear about it I don't want it on my Google scholar whatever it's probably more along those lines it'll be interesting to see especially it'll be interesting to see where the research goes and whether they keep it in the monkeys or whether they advance this kind of research to primates and will this turn into a David Brinn uplift type scenario if any of you have ever read those science fiction novels I highly recommend them for addressing this kind of question of lifting other species up with genetic tools it's time for us to get to our quick stories at the end of the show I've got two metal asteroids I mean it may sound heavy metal now when you think of asteroids you know these iron asteroids meteors that crash down iron ingots are heavy and they're amazing well you know they might also have volcanoes researchers have come up with an idea yes the researchers at UC Santa Cruz have come up with an idea that these metal asteroids may have cooled some of them may have cooled from the outside in leaving a hot molten interior that would cause volcanism and so some metal asteroids may have volcanic activity depending on how they cooled and we have a mission heading out to an asteroid named Psyche that should be a metal asteroid and we can check it out though this is going to be a potential test of that of that hypothesis pretty soon and then additionally another study found that what you eat might impact the effectiveness of medications that you take vaccines there is a common food additive called Tert butyl hydroquinone TBHQ that's fairly common it's used in frozen meat products cooking oils some fish fillets processed foods like crackers chips and fried snacks but not everybody puts the ingredient on their ingredient list so you don't exactly know what it's in but researchers with a couple of separate experiments had unvaccinated mice eating TBHQ in their food those that were unvaccinated and were eating this stuff had more flu virus RNA in their guts than those sorry in their lungs than in mice that didn't eat it the TBHQ eaters also had more inflammation and increased mucus production deeper in their lungs than usual so we don't know how this additive for food may hamper your ability to fight the flu but this could be something that leads to differences in how flu vaccines or even just people are able to fight it off naturally just affect your immune system this is an immune system protein called nerf 2 and when that gets activated it turns down the volume on virus fighting immune cells in the body so you are what you eat eat for health maybe less TBHQ we'll see Blair tell me about the cat's meow oh my goodness so you're a cat owner do you ever ask your cat to come go hey Stella I do all the time by name does she come when she wants to so a recent study from Sophia University in Tokyo looked at how cats recognize or if cats recognize certain words that we say this was for experiments with 16 to 34 animals so not a very large sample size each cat heard a recording of its owner's voice or another person's voice that slowly recited a list of four nouns or others cat's names followed by their name and what they found was that cats perked up most when they heard their own name which means they are they are recognizing their name overall it does seem so even though your cat may not respond when you call their name they might not come when called it's because they don't care it's not because they don't know this gets right at the whole idea of cats you know cats don't care about anything human related people give no credence to cat intelligence so that's part of this too is that even with a dog you say they know their name they don't necessarily know their name that name, that sound to mean come over here and pay attention to me hold up it's a particular sequence of sounds right? how do we distinguish that from the sequence of sounds and response that humans have because this was like a funny thing that happened I had a dog that only knew Danish everything that was spoken to this dog was spoken to Danish now I egospeed to that don't eat that come here now do you want to treat we only talked to the dog in Danish and I mentioned this in passing my dog only understands Danish and the person next to me went wow your dog understands two languages and I was like no that's not how this works but I don't know it's distinct from how humans learn and no things either it's a sound it's the same except that because of our deep understanding of the English language I can tell you your name is Justin that is the proper noun that means me what I'm saying is dogs and cats know their name they recognize the sound but they don't understand that is their proper noun for their existence that is the differentiation so now I'm going to have to test my cat they don't understand language but that grammar can't become Distella not grammar even so that is no no I'm saying they still know that means you come here now and that can still mean that only means me but it does not mean that is my name right identification with self self identification and we are at the end of the show we are at the end of the show there are dogs that can understand multiple multiple names for their toys so how would you then quantify the fact that they can't understand that their name is their name but all the names for their toys and items belong to those individual toys and items that is a great question I hope everyone wants to ponder it I hope everyone wants to ponder it because we have come to the end of our show thank you everyone for listening thank you for listening shout outs to Fada for help with show notes and our social media identity 4 thank you for recording and thanks for coming down from Seattle last week that is awesome thank you to Gord McLeod and Ben Rothig who helps with chat room moderation and I would love to thank our Patreon sponsors thank you to Paul Disney Richard Onimus Stuart Pollock Philip Shane Alex Wilson Brandon Mark Mazzaro Matthew Litwin Bob Calder Richard Hendricks Dave Neighbor John Bertram Steve Alvaron Darrell Meyshack Andrew Swanson David Wilkinson Richard Porter Kevin Reardon Ashish Pan Clifford Ramis Paul Samson John McKee Jason Olds Greg Reilly Kurt Larson Rudy Garcia Gary Swinsburg Robert Coburn Aaron Luther Kevin Parachan Ian E.O. Thank you for all of your support on Patreon and if you would like to be a Patreon sponsor you can find more information at twist.org just click that Patreon link next week we will be back once again with more science for you at 8 p.m. Wednesday evening at our twist.org slash live channel where you can join our chat room you can also join us on YouTube live with a chat room if you'd rather be there both places it's great but if you miss it we'll be there we have we're a podcast and we're on YouTube so it'll be archived and you can find those past episodes on our YouTube channel and at twist.org Yes, thank you for enjoying the show Twist as Kiki just mentioned is also available as a podcast just Google this week in science in your iTunes directory and we should pop right up or if you have one of the mobile non-tether type devices or twist the number 4 droid app in the Android Marketplace which by the way I don't actually think it works anymore we want to look into that mentioning or this week in science in anything Apple Marketplace there is one thing that definitely still works and that's our website at www.twist.org while you're there you can find information on anything you've heard here today you can read show notes you can also make comments conversations with the hosts and other listeners and the other listeners are amazing but if you don't want to talk to them you can just contact us directly email kirsten at kirsten at thisweekinscience.com justin at twistminion at gmail.com or player at playerbaz at twist.org just be sure to put twist which is the name of the show www.twist.org somewhere in the subject line otherwise your email will be into oblivion where we are at twist science at Dr. Kiki at Jacksonfly and at players menagerie we love your feedback if there's a topic you would like us to cover or address a suggestion for an interview please let us know we'll be back here next week and we hope you'll join us again for more great science news yes but if you've learned anything from the show try to remember it's all in your head this week in science this week in 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 on pearl it says the scientist 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 to cause you is a couple of grants this week in science is coming your way so everybody listen to what I say I use the scientific method for all that it's worth and I'll broadcast my opinion all over the earth cause it's this week in science this week in science this week in science science this week in science this week in science science I've got one disclaimer and it shouldn't be news that's 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 get understand but we're not trying to threaten your philosophy we're just trying to save the world from jeopardy and this week in science is coming your way so everybody listen do everything we say and if you use our methods to roll and die we may rid the world of toxoplasma got the eye cause it's this week in science this week in science this week in science science this week in science science science I've got a long 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 I never see the changes I seek when I can only set up shop one hour a week this week in science is coming your way you better just listen to what we say and if you learn anything from the words that we've said then please just remember it's all in your head cause it's this week in science this week in science this week in science this week in science this week in science this week in science science this week in science this week in science this week in science this week in science this week in science this week in science this week in science somewhere along the way my computer updated and no longer opens other pages when I click on their links. What a pop-up blocked. But I want to open that pop-up. You silly pop-up. I could say always, cause I guess it's my website. I trust my website. You should too. Hey everyone, it's the after show. Dun dun dun. I was texting, Blair was texting. We're all texting. We're gonna text each other all over the place. I think Justin got a haircut. The next episode is a palindrome. That it is, 717. Oh, scientific palindromes. Yeah, remember when Justin was gonna go get his haircut right before our live show in Portland? His idea of time is an interesting thing. Yes, he said, we said, hey, we should really get up and go over to the theater because he's, what? I need to get a haircut. What? Why didn't you get a haircut before coming to Portland? I mean, we have good haircutting places here where you can have a drink and have a haircut. Get your haircut. He got his haircut. Upsued and what are you doing flying out? It's not a palindrome. We could have, maybe I'll name next week's show, Taco Cat. I will call it Scientific Taco Cat. Well, then it's not a palindrome anymore. Oh, if I put scientific. I guess not. We just have to think of a palindrome with the word science in it. That would be an interesting one. I could do it. I could figure out something. Or I could just Google it also. The word science backwards does not sound pretty. No. No. Have a good night, Fada. Oh, I'm exhausted. I'm exhausted. Today was a good day, but I'm tired. I was late this evening, which caused the show to be late this evening as part of the science communication organization that I helped run called Science Talk. I'd try and get money for Science Talk. And I applied for a local humanist society. They called it an innovation grant, community innovation grant. And I applied a few weeks back and I got a phone call that said, we will need you to be at our facility for a meeting to present your idea to our organization in person on Wednesday, April 10th. Oh my. That's just wrong timing. Yeah, I was like, oh. But then I was the person who submitted the proposal and I was like, okay, we can do this. And it actually did not turn out that badly considering. Like, I mean, we weren't, I wasn't that late tonight. No. Yeah, let's go. Yeah, you were right on time. Right on, not that bad. Yeah. Ish. You were, as I told the chat room, you arrived in just in time. I did. I did. You were just five minutes late. But to be fair though, in my own defense. It's good. I was asking for money from somebody. In my own defense. It's a good reason. I was born 15 minutes late. So the fact that I'm only five minutes behind everything that happens on the planet now is actually, I've been catching up. So it's taking a while. But I'm slowly getting into the same timeframe as the rest of you, man. Do you want to hear some fun palindromes? Sure. Yes. Eva, can I stab bats in a cave? What? Eva, can I stab bats in a cave? Yeah. This is my favorite. Mr. Owl ate my metal worm. I understand that these are palindromes. They're also nonsense. No. They make perfect sense. You just got to read way deep into them. Taco Cat, however, that makes sense to me. It's just like. Santa lived as a devil at NASA. Also, dammit, I'm mad. Oh, good. Dammit, I'm mad. Never odd or even. That's good. That's pretty solid. Oh, that is solid. Doc note, I dissent. A fast never prevents a fatness. I diet on cod. Which you would have to do to make it a palindrome. Oh my God. I love palindromes. Okay, I apologize for the early exit, but I have to say goodnight. That's okay, I am sick. I want to go to bed. You were looking sniffly and I too just had mentioned that I was tired because of a long day. So, hey, Santa Fe will. Oh. Sounds good to me. We'll see about what. See some hotter balloons, buy some turquoise. That's all I know about Santa Fe. All right, I've never been to Santa Fe. It's not a direct flight from Portland. No, not from here either. The Albuquerque. Yeah, but anyway. In the same state, somewhere. In the same state as Albuquerque. But Santa Fe would be awesome, maybe. So, okay, let's see what happens there. And then, is there anything else that I need? We should make newsletter, Blair. Yes, yeah, we need to do that. Yeah. We need to set up some things and get that going. Because we have people on a list. We made the list and now let's send it. Yeah, we have to flesh out the materials for sure, but it shouldn't be too hard. We can just. Yeah, especially if you just do it. Justin, you want to write a little blog? You want to write a little, a little quick? Yeah, just send me a text reminder that I'm supposed to do something and I'll get it done. In the meantime, though, I'm like, I'm done. I've got to go. What about Uzi Rat in a sanitary zoo? That's good. Okay, I will refrain from pushing any more twist business on you, Justin. Let's say good night. Good night, Blair. Say good night, Blair. Say good night, Justin. Good night, Justin. Good night, Kiki. Good night, everyone. We hope to see you here next week. And yes, Ed's Twitch session this Friday, for sure. I look forward to it this week. Everyone out there. Happy science thing. We'll see you again soon. Thank you.