 we're here. I'm Blair. That's Justin. Kiki is not feeling well. She's a little under the weather, so we're going to steer the ship on our own as best we can without our captain, my captain. This is our YouTube version of the show. So that means that it is not the polished edited edition that one usually sees or hears in iTunes or Stitcher or Spreaker or any of the places that you can listen. So there's probably going to be some edit points tonight because I was just telling Justin I steer this thing maybe once every three, four, five, six months. So it's a little rusty, but we're going to get through it. In the meantime, Justin, are you ready to start? Oh, absolutely. Okay, we're going to do this. I'm also going to attempt to report on some of Kiki's stories. So I'll jump in there with you. Yes. We have not read them. I read them. I read them. They are not my area of expertise. So I'm going to do my best. Okay, great. We are going to get started in one second when I say the things. This is Twist. This Week in Science, episode number 913, recorded on Wednesday, February 15, 2023. What is going on up there? Hi, everybody. I'm Blair Bazderich and today we'll fill your head with cockatoos, snakes, and Planet Nine. But first, disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. Balloons. Recently in a ledge, or perhaps obvious, spy balloon was shot down off the east coast of the United States after sailing over the country. China has claimed the balloon was mainly for weather gathering purposes. It just went a lot off course. The question is, is that okay? Are you allowed to fly a civilian weather balloon across international airspace? Or is it a violation of some international rules? The short answer is yes. Yes, you are allowed to fly high altitude weather data collection balloons across borders, regardless of whose airspace it is. Partly because balloons don't actually last that long at high altitude. Typically 80,000 feet and above. There's usually only a few hours before most typical weather balloons will fail and equipment will parachute safely back to the ground. And partly because it's only for weather science. So why should anybody worry? After all, we want atmospheric scientists and meteorologists to be able to give us the best possible data. However, the international agreements around such balloons state that the balloons must be exclusively for weather collection, not mainly for weather collection. And they have to be no more than four kilograms, not 400 kilograms. So whatever it was that was shot down, spy balloon, weather balloon attempt to get better cell phone reception while roaming. It wasn't part of any agreement. So everyone everywhere, please stick to the agreements. Countries go around shooting down balloons carrying scientific data collection equipment. And we won't have that data. We really rely on that data for monitoring, forecasting and detecting climate altering formulations in our atmosphere. And look, spying tube, because sure, why not? 100,000 feet, you probably don't know what's up there. And even if you do, you can't fly a plane that high to shoot it down. So stick to the agreements or send your balloons high enough to avoid any sort of enforcement. Either way, don't shoot down anything we may need for our researchers here on This Week in Science, coming up next. Science to you Blair and oh, oh no, there's no Kiki. Yes, Kiki is not feeling well this week. So it's just the two of us. I know. So we're going to have to muddle through without her. But you know, the science must go on. Yes. It does whether we do this show or not. Exactly. Yes. Yeah. We'd rather you know about it. So we're continuing. We do miss Kiki. Hopefully she's watching and she can say hi in the chat room. But in the meantime, we have so much science to talk about. Justin, what did you bring? Oh, gosh, I've got better brains through eating mushrooms. I've got an ancient hominin story who is responsible for the first tool use may not be who you think and search a planet nine. That's been that's a bit showed up in the news. And oh, a new thing to worry about as if spy balloons and covid's and monkey pox and earthquakes and everything else that could could get you wasn't enough. Now we have to worry about gloves. If you're not worried about gloves right now, wait till the end of the show by the end of the show. You might be vaguely familiar. We'll get into it. Yeah. Geez. Well, I brought my normal animal stuff. I brought some snakes. I brought some sheep. I brought some cockatoos who actually they might be the first with two. I don't know. Whatever. Anyway, they're using tools. Shocking. But then I also am covering some of the science that he was very excited about this week, which includes what is it? Oh, rings, solar panels in space and a new kind of birth control. Yeah. And there's also some other ones that we might touch on. Yeah, I might talk a little bit about that covid story because that look. Okay, you go for it. That is all I could prepare. So as we jump in before we start just to remind you, you can subscribe to twist through all of the podcast places. You can find us on YouTube. That's probably where you're watching us right now. Hello. Or Facebook. Or you just go to twist.org and you can find your flavor of twist that you prefer or everywhere. Yeah. And of course, you're definitely listening to us as a podcast right now also. Oh, yeah. Because we don't know when it depends on when. That's true. Yeah. Right. It's you and you and you. Yeah, anyway. You and you over there on the Stitcher and you are on the Twitter and then you got to go down the whole list because they know that they're the ones. Listen, all all our listeners and viewers know they're very special. So, anyway, one fella, you know who you are. Anyway. Moving on. Let's start. Justin, do you want to start us off with mushrooms? Yeah, let's let's go right into this. So this is a study finding finds improved brain cell growth and memory from compounds found in mushroom species. Herichium erinaceus, aka the lion's mane mushroom. Fungus has been used in eastern medicine for centuries to treat stomach aches, which has nothing to do with this story. It's also native to northern Europe, North America. Apparently, there's it was so popular in Britain, that it's now illegal to collect it from the wild because it became endangered there. This is published in the Journal of Neurochemistry. Researchers from the University of Queensland have documented increased neuronal growth when exposing neuronal tissue to extracted compounds of the mushroom. In the second leg of the study, extract was given to living mice, and it showed that they had greater short term linear memory acquisition. This is the crude and purified extracts used in the study seem to have similar effects on neuronal growth to brain derived, neutrophic factor BDNF, the natural protein in the brain that promotes growth and protects neuron health. This is when I wish we had the doctors use the brain scientists. So this would have been really helpful if you could have jumped in here. According to the co-author, Dr. Raymond Martinez Marmal of the University of Queensland, the research has implications that could treat and protect against neurodegenerative cognitive disorders. According to the supplement companies, there's a new must-take brain boosting pill in the market. It depends on who you're talking to about what it's going to do. According to the doctor, our idea was to identify bioactive compounds from natural sources that could reach the brain and regulate the growth of neurons, resulting in improved memory formation. And sure enough, the compounds promoted neuron projections, extending and connecting to other neurons and increases in the size of growth cones, which the brain cell uses to sense the environment that it's in and establish new connections with other neurons in the brain, according to the research. So they also found that this was achieved at very low concentration, both in the tissue culture and the living mice, with the improved short-term memory acquisition. So pretty exciting because this is one of those few things like if, you know, you get to a certain age and you want to stop doing the things that decrease memory acquisition. You want to start looking at things that are healthy for your brain for a change. And it sounds like this might be something inactive. We don't want to tell people to go out and buy this mushroom as a supplement or anything like that. You know, the disclaimers for your consult to your doctor or what have you. But I did. You did. I'm a sucker for anything that says it'll give me a better brain. This is in my complete, I don't even look at the back of the label. Don't even care what I'm like, okay, it says it's going to do it. I'll just believe it. That's how easy I am to be influenced by these things. But there is, if you are inclined, there is a research paper out there you can point to to say, see, honey, this is why I'm getting this strange mushroom powder and putting it into my smoothies now. There's a, there's a paper that says that they can do something at least in mice in a laboratory condition. I wonder what it tastes like because I, I love mushrooms, generally speaking. I think that they taste awesome. But it's, I think about a lot of supplements that they're better off in pill form, right? Is this a mushroom that tastes delicious, or is this a mushroom that you're better off just taking the supplement? Ask me in two weeks, because I wrote them both. Okay, great. I can't wait for you to tell us. Okay. Nice. Well, mushrooms for your brains. So moving on, I wanted to report on lunar solar panels, just something that Kiki picked out to talk about this week. So this is from Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos' space company. And they found that they could use the, they could find and use key ingredients for creating solar cells on the moon's surface. So silicone, iron, magnesium, aluminum, and more are just found on the surface of the moon. And they were able to make solar panels out of them in kind of a simulated lunar soil. So it's a material that is chemically and mineralogically equivalent to lunar regolith, the dusty surface of the moon. And they've been doing, they've been working on this for about two years. So they, they are hoping to market this technology to NASA, because of the Artemis program, because they want to send people back to the moon, and it is much more sustainable to build things there than lug things into space from here. So they also think- Even with all our advances, it's still exceedingly expensive. Anything that you're putting into space, let alone getting all, once you're in space, getting all the way to the moon isn't probably that much worse, but- Well, and I know like everybody always tells me how it's a drop in the bucket, but it always bothers me that we are removing matter from the planet and taking it away, not to bring it back. But Blair, we're getting pelted with matter all the time. We're probably still in a net game. I don't think so. We've put a lot of stuff out in the space. Anyway, they can use the same process, they think, to produce metals for building habitats and for other structures also to make oxygen. So it's, they have all these ideas for how they can reduce the amount of things that we're bringing out into space and just make things when they arrive. Kind of, it made me think about Star Trek and the replicators and stuff. So here's the thing I can't decide. Yes. Do I want them to apply an anti-glare to it or not? Like, do I want, do I want to like, oh gosh, the moon's all extra reflective in this one part now? But, or is it cool to go look at, like, look, see those reflective dots on the moon? There's people there. Let me share, there's a picture. It's hard for me to do this and talk. I can't believe that Kiki does this every week. But it's kind of perpendicular to the moon's surface in this rendering. So maybe at certain angles it'd be an issue, but I think most of the time it wouldn't be reflecting back at us. I think I actually, I'm starting to lean towards, I'd want to see a little, little gling, a glimmer of humanity at you. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I love this idea because, again, I just hate a sending matter from planet Earth out into space. So just, I want us to get there and make things. I'd like that much more. Somebody needs to send Blair the breakdown on how much matter the planet collects annually. Yes, but I also recognize the more we do space travel, the more it's going to be. And at a certain point, even if we're not now, we're going to be sending more matter away than we're receiving back. So it concerns me. I will not live long enough to worry about it, but it does concern me. On the list of things, I feel like that one should be pretty low. No, that's fair. Yeah, there you go, solar panels on the moon. Justin, what are gloves? Well, I don't even want to tell you. It's, you know, this is, yeah, this is a, the headline here is something along the lines of 15 million lives at risk from glacial flooding, glacial lakes. What is a glove though? Oh, that's a, you don't want to know. I won't, I'm not going to bring it up again. I apologize. Oh boy. Glacial lakes are formed either by melted ice or creating a bodies of water, water trapped within a glacier or by the glacier itself sort of acting like a dam, forming a lake in an otherwise confined area, like maybe a canyon or a ravine or something like this. Glacial lake outburst floods. Oh, shoot, there it is. Glofts are what happens when those reservoirs bust and the water is released in a very abrupt way. Sometimes enormous amounts of water over a very short period of time, like a dam breaking. This is actually one of the theories for the Younger Dryas extinction event where in a mini ice age that took place on the planet where somewhere in the Great Lakes area, a massive glove took place. A huge inland glacier bound lake had formed over the area of the Great Lakes and then the end of it, the near the Atlantic Ocean busted and all of that water poured out into the North Atlantic in a very short period of time, changing the salinity of water there of course and changing the conveyor belt with all that cold fresh water that normally brings heat up and changed the climate in the Earth. It created a cold spell that nearly extincted people around the Atlantic Rim. So big bad dangerous gloss was when it was a near extinction event for a lot of humanity. So anywho, we don't have to worry about that anymore because that was a long time ago. Only now global warming is increasing the risk of gloss everywhere that there is glacier and high mountain ice. So these things are also they can they can happen pretty quickly because there's not there's not a whole lot of warming you get when an ice dam breaks. You can't just go look in there like a regular dam you might see cracks forming in the concrete or something of this nature. They can there's all sorts of things that is happening in ice that's eroding away. You won't see. Anyway the global assessment in the areas of risk in these outbursts this is led by author Caroline Taylor a doctoral student at Newcastle University in England. They focused on three criteria the size and number of lakes in an area because this is a global assessment they didn't just look at one so there it's it's going to be rough estimates everywhere because they did the whole planet. So they start with the size and number of glacial lakes in area then the number of people living within one kilometer of any main river or draining channel along a 50 kilometer path downstream from those glacial lakes and had an additional assessment of how prepared communities might be for such an event and they based that on a conglomeration of basically industrialized criteria. How industrializes this region with the level of education and engineering resources and that sort of thing in the area that are likely able to to mitigate. They then ranked the risk for each of these regions and actually found that the total are 90 million people across 30 countries live in basins adjacent to glacial lakes currently. That's a much bigger number than I would have thought. Yeah that doesn't sound great. No of these 15 million people live within that that 50 kilometer of the glacial lake and with one kilometer of that potential runout track. So when we're talking about 15 million people in the high risk all the other people in that basin also are going to be massively disturbed and you know rather quickly a risk of being rather quickly disturbed by these events. More than half of these people lived in India, Pakistan, Peru and China. So these are areas where and it's sort of an interesting possibility of why some of this in the high Arctic regions in the Pacific Northwest the risk was much lower due to less population living less population density living near the glacial lakes. They tend to live further away and also some higher levels of industrialization and preparedness. And so one of the things that that sort of occurs here is that glacial lakes are a great source of fresh water. So there is lots of places in the world a high you know incentive to live close to that source of water. And those tend to be slightly less industrialized because the more industrialized areas likely have access to that water by moving it through pumping it out and moving it through water delivery systems pipelines that sort of thing. So that's part of why I think the populations at most risk are denser and closer to the to these but if you didn't have enough to worry about gloss just add that one more thing 90 million people living in the basins. This is one of those things where it's I still hear people talking about climate change like it's a far away issue like it's a nature issue like it's very separate from everyday humans. And this is a reminder when we talk about like catastrophic climate events this is the sort of thing. It's you have your flash freeze at the wrong month that destroys crops or freezes out entire infrastructure sections. You have your flash floods you have a storm parade as in California destroyed a bunch of infrastructure but now even so much farther on the spectrum you have your glacial lake outburst flood you just have like catastrophic change in a space. Yeah and this is you know there's pockets of this everywhere people that maybe don't realize that there's glaciers everywhere. In anywhere where there's a lot of high altitude like you can run into this certainly in the Alps. So then you're talking about Austria and parts of Italy and other you know but population wise it won't be as dense there but this is a problem that's going to be popping up we're going to be hearing about glacial dam bursts going forward. Well and as Ben says in the chat room in YouTube he says people don't want to think about something bad that could happen to them and that's absolutely right but this is the thing about climate change. Really? Is that when? I do that all the time. If you think about something bad at least this is how I work I know this is how some other people work I'm not going to speak for everybody but if you are picturing a scenario that could happen to you and you have no possible way out or solutions to it it is much easier not to think about it but if you have steps that you can take to make yourself safe through that situation you will take those steps and you will prepare. It's like you live in San Francisco you don't think about oh there might be an earthquake that's going to suck I don't want to think about it. No you make an earthquake kit right you like prepare yourself for the potential of something bad happening this is one of the situations where we're getting the science we're getting the figures to recognize these things are going to happen let's work together to prepare for them make them less bad if possible but ultimately we know some things from climate change are going to happen for sure let's prepare our communities our nations our humans to deal with it. Yeah and that's actually something that's interesting and what you said there's come up in the news quite a bit lately about oh could the earthquake that happened in Turkey and Syria could that California could that happen there and the answer is yes and it has before and it will again and California as much as you if you're from California you heard people complain about building code oh the building code and California is the worst building code anywhere in the United States it's so restrictive and has all these these extra things you need to do and when those earthquakes happen in California you're not going to see a lot of damage you're not going to see buildings falling down or neighborhoods of cities falling down because preparation they have prepared they built it into their building code a long time ago and they continue to improve it and retrofit and done this sort of thing so when we get those big earthquakes and dense populated big cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles and we've both been through a few of them there's really not that much damage in comparison yes but it also I think it helps to recognize if you have prepared and knowing what regulations exist to help keep you safe and that's what I'm what I'm trying to explain here is like this is not a time to ignore these large impacts on climate change this is the beauty of the science that's coming out now of saying these things are probably going to happen let's work to prepare for them so that the loss of life is less than it would be if we ignored it yeah yeah the research like this can definitely be used in those communities that are at the highest risk to try to engineer their way out of this you know either by by creating an artificial drain out track just in case the thing happens that would bypass the dense population but you're not going to build that you're not going to build that without the science because right then you don't have the paper to start to point to and say hey look this mushroom had a study about it and that's why I bought it as a supplement and yeah somebody asked in the chair room I think it was Ben yes it has been peer reviewed that just means somebody else checked the the science of it not the ethics um well let's leave earth because this is depressing and let's talk about something outside all right good bye everybody I thought I didn't think we were going to announce so soon we were from and this is a story about the icy dwarf planet and I googled how to say it because Kiki's not here and I'm still going to butcher it it's quarroar quarroar why you did it you did a lot of study there you're still you're still looking for it I looked it up and I immediately forgot it it's Q-U-A-O-A-R um it's it's a dwarf planet and it's doing something really weird it's about half the size of Pluto it's beyond Neptune it has a ring which is the start of what's interesting it is only the third ring to be found around a minor planet and only the seventh ring system in the solar system which is I guess more than half but so anyway um they they they found a ring around quarroar but what's really interesting is that it's really really far from the planet and when I say that it's like really really far away I'm gonna share an image so if you're listening please go to our show notes and look up an image of this the ring is just so far away um let me use words to explain what far away means if I could find them uh they are seven planetary radii the the the ring is seven planetary radii away from quarroar so seven times it's radius which is twice as far out as the theoretical maximum limit for a ring system which is known as the Roche limit Saturn's rings the main part of Saturn's rings is three planetary radii away from Saturn okay so I already have an idea what this might be yeah my my guess can I can I guess on it please my guess is because this is this is interesting this is a kuiper belt object it's it's all that just happens to be also one of the stories that the I'm gonna bring later is related to the kuiper belt uh one of the theories for for what planet nine might be is a planetary core like a planet bashed into another planet and its core went flying around so that it would be very very dense it's all the heavy metal part of the the densest part of the planet out there floating around if this was if this could be a similar type of an object if this could have been a destroyed bigger planet that just has its core intact then then it would be denser than most planets it had more more mass more therefore more gravity than most plants so what looks like seven planetary what's its far away is you know there's only a calculation of how dense the thing would be or how much mass and how much gravity it's exerting uh to keep that over so that would be my guess that's a great guess they don't know yeah they don't know it was previously thought to be impossible to have a ring that far out so they're trying to figure out how to explain it theoretically haven't figured it out yet as far as they can tell it should not be stable yeah it's but that's if it's a normal planet to it right if it is one of these cores the size you would picture for a planet to be around that that would that should naturally be around it would be much bigger because it's all it doesn't matter it doesn't care size is meaningless in the in planetary uh gravitational but like mass is important mad that how yeah how massive massive it is is everything you're right this is mass is the most important thing uh well they discovered it by accident which I think is really interesting uh they were investigating whether choir choir has an atmosphere they were using high speed a hypercam instrument um which is on a telescope in spain's canary islands they can spot variations in light from background stars so it's still too small and too faint to be seen via direct imaging through Hubble um so they they this is yeah this is not a picture obviously but um so this is what they think so this is the other problem this is what they think is going on this is the size of the planet they think it is of the type they think it is of the type of ring that they think it is so you're right there's there's lots of question marks here that are not answered yet they just kind of saw this thing that went like oh my god that should not be possible so it's raising a lot of eyebrows and hopefully we'll find out more it's crazy to think about that that ring so far away looks so odd yeah I like this though because this this discovery this is uh oh this is the the main years ago we oh let me go get their names I have it I think somewhere in this other story we interviewed uh Mike Brown and and Constantine bat battigan who had initially brought forward the planet nine uh idea that some of these objects out there are affected by this this hidden planet that we haven't found uh and their main theory now the thing that they've decided the object probably is is a planetary core so if we find an if we find a planetary core on the outskirts of the kuiper belt that gives a good you know credence to their hypothesis because we found another exit we found an example of that occurring that far out all right there's trillions of objects out there they're all the all smaller than our moon at the largest even and many of them many of them have have have interesting satellites Pluto has five moons even even though it's nice and small and a moon and that that orbit that can capture satellites and moon can also capture dust ring right in form of dust ring so that part's not that unusual the distance out yes the Roche limit is the thing is the thing that physics should not allow according to what we understand and therefore doesn't and so then the next explanation is it's really heavy right it's great it's got a lot of mass it's very dense yeah I don't know I look forward to hearing more about yeah the first thing we need to do is rename it hey listen internet I don't want to hear it I don't want to hear how wrong I was I know I said it wrong just let me have it quarrar it's fine moving on um I think that's all for our short stories uh if you just tuned in you're listening to this week in science it normally dr kiki would be here talking but instead I'm Blair bastard rich and I'm joined by Justin Jackson Justin did you want to talk about a covid story is a quick covid segment all right so here's I'm going to try to do this story this is uh where I haven't read yet this looks like it's uh looks like a press release from the University of Sydney which uh if you're checking uh I think that's in Australia so they what they did is they basically found a protein in the lung that naturally is blocking SARS COVID-2 uh infection COVID-19 infection so I like this story because for one thing it might help explain why a good portion of the population didn't really have the effects the asymptomatic infections might have this genetic underpinning might have this protein in their lungs helping them and that this this paper that they've published mirrors two other papers that are just getting published out of Oxford uh uh Brown and Yale in the US a couple of a couple of three universities two other papers that also found this this new receptor protein that is stopping the COVID-19 from uh from causing uh causing any problems so it let's see let me see if I can get down into the so there it's a receptor for coronavirus meaning the virus can bind to it but unlike ACE2 which is its favorite target that causes all sorts of problems this receptor does not support infection it can stick to the virus immobilize it and in the process prevents other vulnerable cells from becoming infected they're describing it as being like a molecular velcro to the felty spike of the virus anyway the this of course gives a potential drug target or drug creation uh target because this wasn't something that we really understood or knew existed before we came up with the our antivirus protections this is a new venue a new method anyway um also they don't go into it at all in this study from what I can see here and I'm just reading this for the first time but my if I was to if I was to guess I would look for this gene to be I would I guess would be this is a neanderthal gene something that we inherited from neanderthals if you look at the rates of infection uh by ethnicity it almost tracks percentage of neanderthal DNA there's a matching ratio the correlative in my head yeah so it may be it may be that that neanderthals or denisovans in that group had encountered enough viruses that they've built up this this immunity that current uh other current modern humans have not now anybody can get this there's no guarantee you would have this gene too so that stochastic nature of some people having it some people not would be also indicative of whether or not you got this or that neanderthal gene passed down to you which would be much much more stochastic even within any ethnicity groups that are out there so very interesting can't wait to hear more about this one I want I immediately though want to know want to know the history of this thing and see how it got to us because it's not whenever you see something like that that's not in all current modern humans then you know it might not be from current modern humans originally maybe that's that's an interesting idea there's there has to be some explanation for how even some people in the same house one person would get it and be sick with it for two weeks and their spouse wouldn't get it so there has to be something going on there that uh that explains that phenomenon so it's it makes sense it would be genetic it's I yeah I look forward to kind of hearing what correlations go along with that and exploring that it's very interesting and and we may have had a better a better way of preventing uh we may have we we may be at the cusp of finding a better way to prevent future yes coronavirus there is always that because yes this is not the last coronavirus we're no no no we're just we're very good at what they do beginning we're just at the beginning about yeah they're skilled they're they're uh they're experts in their field well thanks everyone for listening to twist before we wait is that the end of the show no no we have more okay before we move on I'm doing all the kiki things you see okay yeah before we move on wanted to remind everybody how they can help us grow and do more every week and one way that you can do that is by going to twist.org and clicking on the patreon link you can choose your level of support you can donate to us monthly and help us keep the lights on here at this weekend science are you ready Justin it's that time of the show oh is it time for Blair's Animal Corner with Blair? What you got Blair? It's really hard to operate the music and the the video and stories at the same time again my hat's off to you kiki it's hard work so I was trying to make myself big there we go it's time for Blair's Animal Corner I actually have three today I had one that I was going to do in the quick stories but I did the space stuff instead so first I have a story that I'm ticked off about this week I first read it and I was like oh that's really cool and then I thought more about it and then I got mad and then I thought more about it and I got more mad University of Queensland led a study to look at how snakes hear they found that as well as ground vibrations snakes can hear and react to airborne sound just is this surprising to you the snakes can hear? Not in the least no they played three different sound frequencies to captive red snakes one at a time in a sound proof room observed reactions their idea was because snakes don't have external ears people typically think they're deaf and can only feel vibrations through the ground in their bodies what people are they biologists because I don't think that they are and there's one reason for that if you look at a snake's anatomy in their head they have literally everything for ears they have a cochlear canal they have all of the inner ear structures they they have ears they have ears they just have a scale that goes over the external ear covering lizards have that some of them but it just because it's covered that doesn't mean that they can't hear like sound moves through things we know this like my neighbors can hear me yelling right now and there's a wall there and that's a lot thicker than a single scale of keratin so this I'll finish reading the story so there's other breaking news this other breaking news I hate to interrupt you but I have breaking news yeah it turns out birds can hear yeah wait hang on it turns out frogs can hear yes frogs that yeah wait turns out alligators can hear it turns out whales whales can hear that's a lot of things without the external ear just you know I don't well a lot of most of those animals you mentioned have ear holes which is the difference there is no ear hole birds have ear holes I did yes yes they do yeah yeah they're just covering feathers um so they played different sound frequencies to capture bred snakes they were non attestatized they were free moving snakes they do react to sound waves sometimes they reacted to human voices yeah they looked at 19 individuals looking at five genetic families of reptile their reactions differed but depending on the genus that which makes sense because they all have different reactions to sound depending on if they're a predator or a prey or what kind of environment they live in and what kind of sounds mean what things so that this yeah this is this is what definitely a we didn't need a study for that um but the I just at first I was like oh that's so cool finally confirmed snakes can hear through their ears and then I was just like hold on a second this was never something I questioned if you've ever been to uh what do you call a reptile uh exhibit with live reptiles there's never I've never seen the sign that says go ahead and tap on the glass they can't hear you anyway so what what I if I was at University of Queensland the way that I would defend that is that oh the expectation was they're feeling the vibration from the tap because it is true that snakes can can infer a lot of information based on vibrations because their whole body is laying on the ground so they have a lot more contact with the ground than we do and so they have a lot more intimate relationship with vibration than we do for so I think it's one of those things where like people your stats are blind because they're good at echolocation so because snakes are good at vibration yeah they don't need ears so you're saying there's a very good reason for this study if only to overcome uh some public misinformation or lack of understanding so this is really someone once again did we need a study for that yeah you actually probably did I would argue no because all you have to do is dissect a snake head and you see all of the structures evolutionarily think about how long snakes have been around evolutionarily weeks yes at least hundreds of millions of years so they've been around for a very long time and if they didn't need the cochlear canal or the temporal membrane or like any of these things that are part of an ear if they didn't need those they wouldn't have them anymore well they could be so that's not like whales have toes is like the example you know the vestigial but but they're vestigial this is a fully developed functioning structure it is not reduced it is not different it is the same so all you need to do is look and go huh they have ears though maybe they use them I don't need to talk about this too long it's just why it's it's fine snakes can hear let's get over it all right so moving on um Justin do you have any friends that you're like very friendly with and the basis of your friendship is shared trauma you don't need to tell me what it is but is that ever like you're like oh man remember this one time we went through this crazy experience and it like made you tighter right this is this is a common human experience yeah defined no no no you've got a very easy life this is what you're telling me no I I don't remember I I don't know maybe maybe they were traumatic I should ask them I was like hey remember when we had that fun really fun time they're like oh yeah okay let me reduce the verbiage let me use the verbiage from the scientific study have you ever gone through a stressful experience that you have later bonded over oh probably not yeah this is a very common human thing you're like oh man remember that time we had that you know just think about like oh we had that one teacher that was really terrible and they like boba and they they gave us all crazy grades and they assigned us homework on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving and you know you like to talk about crazy stuff that happened to you with your friends this is like a very common thing like remember that time that we lost our bus pass and we had to walk through a really weird neighborhood we got lost and like you know this is a very normal human experience is to bond overstress so the the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization in Australia wanted to study this in sheep because for one prior study has shown that sheep are able to recognize and remember faces of other sheep and for two prior research shows that humans tend to bond when undergoing stressful events so those two things together they're like if they can recognize each other if we stress them out a little bit will they bond over that stress so what they did is they took 70 adult female sheep who are unknown to one another the group was divided into seven subgroups of 10 use each some of the subgroups were exposed to different stripes of stress they're about to traumatize these sheep they weren't traumatized they were stressed and I will I will say none of them were harmed so let me explain so they were they were exposed to stressful events while other groups were not they were all normal events in the day of a life of a sheep but they're a more stressful moment than when they're just grazing one was being herded by a dog one was being transported in a trailer one was being collared and held by a human and one was simulated crutching so it wasn't even the actual act which is when they remove wool from legs and their tails using electric clippers and they're they're basically the same clippers you would use on your head or your beer or whatever and afterwards they were put on they were fitted with a GPS device so that they could see who they hung out with in the pasture initially the sheep who had become acquainted at the start of testing before they were sent into their different areas to have their different stressors they moved closer to one together oh hey I remember you but shortly thereafter the sheep that that were stressed that had gone through their stressful events left those and instead found the other sheep they were in that stressful event with really yeah this sheep that had not undergone stressful events stayed with the original group the sheep that they met at the very beginning so they they posit here that um these sheep had bonded in the same way that humans do to stressful events so basically they were like oh hey you are in that crazy dog-herding thing with me I'm gonna hang out with you so sheep who go through shared stressful events tend to huddle together compared to sheep who do not yeah so next time next time you're uh looking for a way to do some corporate team building and you want your your team to come together get some border collies oh yeah find a way to create a traumatic experience the the fun times apparently aren't going to be as useful in building team camaraderie but if you can stress everybody out announce that there's going to be company and wide layoffs and they're looking at your division specifically and then and then let them off the hook well they look like you're going to keep everybody here and everybody's like oh gosh we gotta stick together from there this could be useful think about a lot of corporate icebreakers that exist and I think those are simulated stress so there's like um use these toothpicks to create a structure or like um go find xyz in the building or you know scavenger guns you know these are simulated stress there's no stakes or how all of uh how all of right wing media operates oh fake stress yeah oh yeah fake news stress yeah oh wow there's my people might have been are you are you just describing our our tribalistic nature in the united states based on political affiliation is all based on stress well that's an interesting idea if you look at I don't know that it works as well on the left maybe it does but I definitely see the the right uh political machine focused on fear and stress uh inducing subjects or making otherwise innocuous subjects sound frightening and stressful and then maybe that causes a a stronger coalition of the stressed and afraid to stick together against whatever well now I want to find you I deleted it so now I need to go into my trash but um oh no where is it the democratic party sent me an email that said no I cannot find it it said like uh you'll never guess who's running as a republican for president now and then I opened it it was like all red letters really things it was it was fear wagering for sure fear wagering yeah give us some money this is bad it's so I think you know it's pretty standard anyway that's we're very far away from sheep now um let's leave the sheep and let's talk about cockatoos cockatoos pretty much one of the only things we talk about with cockatoos on this show is that they are good at tools tools yes this is the latest kind of breakthrough in what cockatoos are capable of with tools and I love this story goffins cockatoos have been added to the short list of non-human animals that use and transport tool sets this behavior has only been previously reported in chimpanzees and humans and humans of course yes we have literal toolboxes and so uh these cockatoos carry multiple tools to their worksite when the job calls for it previously they've been shown to use in manufacturer tools a recent study of wild cockatoos reported that they can use up to three different tools to extract seeds from particular fruit in succession up until now researchers weren't sure if it would they just use something they were like oh now I need something else or if it was part of a plan I'm going to use this and then this and then this and so they wanted to see if there was a plan and the tools are part of a set or if they were just using three tools because they used one and it didn't get the job done and they moved on to the next one these are two very different levels of thought yeah so it's possible that what might look like a tool set is instead a chain of single tool uses with the need for each new tool appearing to the animal as the task evolves so the way that they did this um before I get into the whole explanation the long and short of it is they put a task far away from where the tools were and so the cockatoos had to prepare and bring the appropriate tools to the location so here's how they set it all up it was inspired by the termite fishing chimpanzees in northern Congo who they've done this study with to see about tool sets and so they were able to collect the termites the chimps via a two-step process first they use a blunt stick to break holes in the termite mound and then they used a long flexible probe to fish out the termites out of the holes so what they did is they tried to replicate that situation with cashews they presented the cockatoos with a box containing a cashew behind a transparent paper membrane I picture kind of like wax paper almost but to reach the cashew the cockatoos had to punch through the membrane and then fish the cashew out they could not use one tool to do this they were provided with a short pointy stick for punching holes that's not going to get the cashew out for you and then a vertically halved plastic straw it's like a little scoop for fishing it out seven of the ten cockatoos taught themselves to extract cashews successfully by punching through the membrane and two of them completed the task in 35 seconds of their first attempt wow and no this is not something that they already had innately in their brain because they don't have an equivalent foraging behavior in the wild as far as we know also each cockatoo had a slightly different technique so that's the other thing that tells you it's not just something that cockatoos know how to do innately because they all did it differently next they wanted to see if their tool use was flexible depending on the situation so they presented each cockatoo with two different types of box one had the membrane and one didn't so in one case you need both tools in one case you just need the the little scoop tool the cockatoos were given the same two tools and they acted according to the problem sometimes a tool set was needed sometimes only one tool was enough all of the cockatoos mastered this test they were able to recognize when a single tool is sufficient but they engaged in kind of a different behavior in the choosing phase so they would pick one up pick the other tool up pick the first one up again so they kind of were thinking it through before they picked up a tool the last thing we wanted to do to see if this tool set they could really think through what do I need for the task ahead was putting that distance part so figuring out how they would transport the tools on an as needed basis so they put the cockatoos through a series of increasingly challenging trials to test the boxes first they had to climb a short ladder then they had to fly horizontally and in the final test they had to carry the tools while flying vertically they were only sometimes presented with a box of the membrane barrier sometimes they were not so they had sometimes they needed both tools and sometimes they didn't some cockatoos learned to carry the tool tools together they would actually put the short punching stick into the groove of the half straw so they could carry them at the same time and then and then you're ready for anything exactly and so they they did that when they were presented with the box that had the membrane on it most of them transported them on an as needed basis um a couple of them made two trips when necessary but most of them were able to figure that out but one cockatoo figure oh he always brought both he's the one you're talking about he's the prepared individual just just don't overthink uh the job ahead you never know what you're gonna run into bring all the tools bring your tool box the last thing you want to do is have to load up the van drive back to the workshop go searching through the right oh which tool do i need now have it all there on your work work vehicle or your talent clutch whatever this is Figaro right here this is Figaro bringing his two tools in his mouth in his beak there every single time i want to be prepared yep so that's definitely a whole extra layer to tool use where you can use tool sets and anticipate need for tool sets very neat oh cockatoos you're so smart yeah so very smart but then also what does that tell us about brain size and tool use brain size doesn't mean anything i'm sick of it it's all silly i mean it's within within specific clades it matters it depends right this is what we've learned is like you can't compare a human brain to a bird brain but can you compare a cockatoo brain to an ostrich brain no you can't you have to yeah does it matter does it matter at all there's some science that says it does i don't know i'm i'm unconvinced yeah more on that later in my my one of my stories well speaking of that that's it for the animal corner so bring it on bring on the tool use justine okay goodbye animal corner if you're just tuning in you're still listening to the show that you started tuning into when you when this all began it's called the whatever what's the show called again it's called this week in science justine this week in science that's right that's the show no it's called this week in science comma justin that's what it's called comma justin and uh so we have to this is we have a fake station break right stay tuned for more this week in science if you are interested in a twist shirt or a mug or other item of twist merchandise head to twist.org and click on the zazzle link to browse our store and twist merch ad oh wait i guess that's supposed to read that part so we're talking this is a perfect time and we were talking about brain size and tool use and gosh it looks like they had this whole tool set and tool selection and use and really quick at figuring out how to use these tools just from a couple of cockatoos this study published in the journal science researchers say they found the oldest example of old one stone tools being used to butcher a large animal so until we find an older one yeah but this is but this is the oldest one right now all the one tools were used for over million years and they aren't the oldest tools ever found there are older cruder stone tools by about a half a million years older than older one tools but they but the older ones are of a consistent style of tool making that is first seen in east africa around 2.6 million years ago and it then spreads across africa the middle east europe asia over the next million years and every hominin at some point is using this tool set any every ancient hominin you know of that era that era seems to be using these tools this new report from kenya kenya identifies tools dated between 2.6 and 3 million years old again previously the oldest dated around 2.6 million years ago and 800 miles away from this location in ethiopia so the site is the earliest evidence of large animal butchering and in this case it's hippos which for ancient hominins you're talking about the world's most deadliest game or what yeah it's the deadliest creature on the planet and 2.6 to 3 million years ago we're all we got hominins who were already apex predatoring the the environment with these stone stone tools or okay or it was scavenging it could have been that yeah yeah yeah that's what i was gonna say but this is this is butchering and rendering and removing meat from from hippos which yeah no no slouch if it's from scavenging that's also great that doesn't lessen the find really no but it's because there's no evidence of hunting that we can point to on this so it's likely to scavenging perhaps most interesting of all there were a massive pair of molars found on this site belonging to to pranth uh i'm gonna mess it up pranthropus it's i believe it's quara pranthropus is is a isn't an ancestor this is this is the side branch of human ancestors this is this broke off before australopithecus this is going into the way way back machine and it's the only evidence it's only a couple of molars found on the site but it's the only hominin evidence outside of the tools and it's not our ancestors using them from what we can tell so this is a distinctly different early hominin than australopithecus that was also really existing in the same age and these the they went on to both were asked for like another million years or so pranthropus has i mean we just talked about birds using tools like it's it's a convergent trait convergent trait we're not the only ones it could be could be so here's the problem okay so this is this is a site this is very different huge uh uh molars they have a sagittal crest kind of like a gorilla that bony ridge on top of the skull which would have been an attachment point for really strong chewing muscles it's been assumed that they ate for sometimes that they really hard foods or chewed a lot of grass and that's what they can say they're thought to be vegetarians using these giant molars and this big chewing muscle and their jaws for breaking down vegetation the thing is they find that these tools were largely used for breaking down vegetation as well as for for rendering all sorts of animals that were there the largest of which were three hippo remains that they found it had a larger brain case than our line of ancestor at the time brain size isn't everything but it's not nothing especially when you're talking about well supposedly when you're talking about ancient hominins but maybe not the discovery also makes it potentially the oldest paranthropus discovery the oldest being around 2.6 million years ago 800 miles away in Ethiopia which also is where some of the oldest stone tools have been found for for this particular manufacturing style of old one so wait a second now now we've got okay the oldest version of these this manufacturing technique and there is also a toolkit in these there's there's smashers there's cutters there's slicers they have a toolkit that is used sometimes on vegetation sometimes for cutting and removing rendering animals so they they have that same they maybe maybe three or four tools it just to outdo the cockatoos I guess the cockatoos might have more than that we only gave them two in that example these all just look like rocks though they do but they but when you find them all collected together with rendered animals and you can find the rendered animal isotopes or what have you on the on them and they're all hammered out the same way so they're all made in the same way this is this is how these are identified because uh truth be told they are just rocks yeah that is also it's also very true they are just rocks that was our first technology fair so so it's interesting so then so then in this discover we're finding this offshoot this earlier offshoot peranthropus associated with these older one tools and animal rendering and our other previous example oldest example 2.6 million years ago 800 miles away of these tools is also where we have the other oldest example of peranthropus turns out when looking into this the leakies have discovered peranthropus and associated with the tools that they were finding and in one case there was a finding that was even showed animals that were rendered but then when they found the early homo species that had the largest skulls they immediately decided that that's who created the tools like it can't be these guys back to brain size again come on so we so the actual earlier evidence already associated them and this was a later find I think this was a 1.7 to 2 million year old find where there was a more a larger brain cased hominin uh or ancestor of ours that was running around but because we we'd already found evidence associating them with these tools and with animal rendering but because there was a larger brain hominin running around the area they oh it must be must be that guy that that fella right so this is just then confirming the misdirection that took place was a misdirection and that they yes can be associated with the tools and with rendering and now are the oldest example of it which means I mean once again our our our answers may have borrowed a technology right yeah not invented keep seeming to happen keep seeming to just sort of it's a compliment that's a great idea form of flattery right yeah so but this sort of does change a couple things yes site had at least three individual hippos there there were 330 artifacts recovered over 1700 animal bones and the site uh deep cut marks from the hippo's rib fragment and a series of short perillel cuts on the shin bone of another they also found antelope that showed evidence of hominin slicing away with stone flakes haven't been crushed by hammer stones to extract marrow there's also very much changes what we thought peranthropus peranthropus i what am i at am i at it yeah peranthropus uh eight not just a vegetarian or a you know omnivore that's eating grubs and grasses as as we have evidenced in and later versions of it uh in different regions in africa yeah so the three and they've also noticed that they're the wear on teeth of ones that they found previously wasn't what you would expect from something chewing really hard matter so even despite having these big jaws that were built for the task and one of the reasons why we might not be seeing those wear marks they had other tools for that they were rendering plants in animals and if you were curious about how long hippos have been around as i was i just googled it and hippo ancestors have been around for around 20 million years um hippos themselves as we know them today their the fossil record shows about 1.5 million years so a hippo-like thing has got to be what this is unless this is pushing the hippo fossil record back farther maybe that's maybe that's being overlooked in the telling of the stale is that hippos are much older than we thought they are maybe but also if it's a hippo ancestor they may have been even bigger yes that is that did occur to me or smaller or small i could could be their render you know would be terrible to find out at the end of this story which i don't have any that the hippos they found were the small size of cats right all cats right no i'm sure oh well i'm sure they're comparable because they have the teeth right so they know generally how big the animal oh so actually hold on no they have the teeth of the humans they have the molars of the humans the hominids yes yes so i'm i'm curious but they have so they have bits of hippo though they have bones they've got rib and everything else yeah it's hippo so i'm gonna assume that it's 2.9 to 3 million years old yeah wherever you got you're wherever that's why you don't trust the google i found a few different sources um but that's i mean it's also possible that they could have just said hippo because it is a hippo relative that is approximately the size of a hippo and then who really cares so that's not what this study is about so i appreciate that but i was just kind of sidetracked on that because i was like man how long have hippos been around so anyway um that's very cool i love this idea that uh the tool sets are ancient and ancient and not ours and not how we don't have like like not even like it was one thing when you know like the the incremental removal of current modern humans from inventing anything like oh yeah we came along with our biggest brains and our cognitive abilities and we made fire and tools and did all this oh turns out fire was already being used oh and the tools much older that's sometimes much older than current modern humans it's our ancestors that invented what's that they borrowed it from somebody else from the neighbors where now we're finding out that we we just like can i have our way and also your tools that would be great and also can you show me how to use your tools i would appreciate it human human needs has been borrowing a lot of technology over the years hey that's what we do best hey that's a skill set it's fine there's no shame in borrowing a good idea my last story tonight uh kind of touches on some of the stuff that we have talked about this is the search for planet nine so we've uh we interviewed mike brown and constain that again uh gosh like four fourish years ago about uh about planet nine so the idea is there's the outer when you get past Neptune we've got the kuiper belt giant donut that encompasses that that region there's like we were talking about before trillions of icy objects out there that are smaller than our moon some much much much of course smaller than that even Pluto is is one of the things that got removed is being a planet by mike brown because doesn't clear its orbit it's it's in that kuiper belt it's in there with other objects other dwarf planets other things that have satellites and moons in that big cluster of icy objects out there so on the outer edges there are some anomalies there's a bunch of objects that are cluster have an orbital cluster which means that they these things go around the sun they don't always go they don't go in a perfect circle they sort of have these sometimes elliptical paths and these objects on the outer edges of the kuiper belt all have a an ellipse or an elongation of their orbits in this in a specific direction they're all in the same direction and that's how that's how the scientists first started looking at like why is that what would explain that and you know the the caltech researchers were fresh off of having killed Pluto and they're out there hunting for another thing to idea to kill and like some people were like oh maybe it's a plant they're like no it's not a planet we're gonna go ahead and prove to you another planet isn't a planet because it doesn't exist and by the time they were done studying it they were like well it's got a 99.8 percent chance of there being a planet so people started looking for this and they haven't found it and it shouldn't be surprising it's they can't it's not that it's a mystery that they haven't found it it's further away than Pluto further away than this the thing you're talking about the what we were talking about earlier it were that Hubble hasn't even gotten a good look at teeny tiny we have their only problem is the mass needs to be five to ten times the mass of the earth well then it should be you know bigger you would think than a lot of than any other object really in that Kuiper belt you're talking about something that's multiple earth masses so there's three theories of why this thing well four I guess one it could just be a planet we haven't spotted it because things are far away and it's hard to see anything especially if you don't know it's exact orbit so they narrowed down it's exact orbit they've got a range it's still celestially large area but they have areas where they can focus looking for for planet nine still haven't found it so then there's other theories well the one that we we mentioned earlier in the show that the the people who proposed planet nine like is that this could be a planet core big planets smashing into each other in the early ages of the solar system the core of the planet being all that's left taking off into the slightly different orbit so this is the other thing it could have a weird orbit if it's from a big collision event like planets running into each other planetary bodies why would it have a weird orbit because it smashed into something and so it could have a slightly different trajectory as it goes around and the reason is pretty much everything out there is moving around in a pretty similar direction around so if something has a whatever the what they call that or an orbit that's going counter or an often a different direction it's tougher to track because astronomers are used to it we'll look here we'll look here we'll look here we'll look here and then incrementally tracking something as it moves across in a sort of recognizable way so if it's got a weird a different style of orbit a different sort of orientation could be harder for for it to be tracked it might show up in a frame and then you go look for it again and it's gone really hard to write but this this idea of then it could be much smaller and there's this and have all of this mass which would make it difficult there are also ideas that it could be a tiny black hole that's out there past the Kuiper bell whenever there's a question in space you always got to throw out the black hole option well there so i i've always liked this i've always liked this idea a little bit that there could be like a solar system out there somewhere that's just made up of different size black holes over a much larger area than of course it may be a normal solar system because that you measure these things in solar masses and send thousands or millions of solar masses and you get a couple of these black holes and they could they could maybe be circling around each other and orbit why not the problem is to get one that's in earth masses you have to have some exceptions or reinterpretations or different understandings of the standard model it has been proposed by people who want to say oh we can go beyond the standard model if if we have all of these conditions that standard model keeps going so it could be a black hole but i don't think it is but it would explain why we couldn't see it because it'd be so small we would never see this black hole others have said maybe it's dark matter a cluster of dark matter that's zipping around which is also one of those things that we haven't been able to detect visually like our magnetically infrared we don't have a way to see that either so if planet nine's and any of those things chances are we'll just never find it oh but there's a story here uh yes this is uh this is a new sort of unconventional way of looking at the problem the detection approach being proposed by man who chan who's an assistant professor of something i couldn't find it department of science and environmental studies at the education university hong kong suggesting oh we could just look at title heating from satellites so if there is this massive object it could have satellites the size of it based on uh uh trans estimates could be as many as 20 satellites 20 moons or orbital objects could be going around something that's the mass that they are suggesting that planet nine is and if so each time they went around planet nine as they come closer the ones that are closest i guess to the planet would have these large tidal effects which would generate heat even if even if planet nine is a black hole or just a dark matter cluster if it has orbiting things they would still be affected by this this tidal heating energy and so there could be a heat signature of sorts that we could we could read from the satellites so interesting approach part of the part of the maybe problem of it is it would need to be that this tidal heating effect slows down over time so these the more recent and closer to the planet that the orbiting satellites could be would be the better this heating radio spectrum could be possibly detected so it's a planet nine's very old primordial universe creation those orbits may have settled down into a very low tidal energy orbit then it would be invisible again but still it should be it should be because of the mass that they propose planet nine if it has satellites they should be hotter than anything else in the Kuiper bell because there's nothing else that big there's nothing else with that many with that with that the sort of forces going on so if there is this tidal energy the spike out there we should be able to see it separately from everything else so it's an interesting it's an interesting approach and because we have a pretty narrowed down orbital shell of where planet nine should exist we might we might be able to narrow it down in how many years what do you think when are we gonna find out what planet nine is so it's it's gonna probably take some luck i i'm wondering if uh james web yeah has a shot but the problem it's actually you know why is it so hard to see something that's so close to home yes we're looking at the planets traversing stars and distinct uh distant uh parts of the the galaxy it's because it's so close to home yes yeah you can you you literally have every direction that you might have to look for this thing in and you have to be looking at the right time if you're pointing your telescope at a faraway galaxy it's not moving yeah you can just point at it and take as long of a picture as you want it's not going anywhere we might not know until we go there huh yeah so you might need to put well that's the idea is it might take uh uh putting probes out past the kuiper belt yes uh that can that can do the detection closer up which would always help but again it serves you as you move back that shell of orbiting the sun past the orbit of neptune past the kuiper belt that's a big shell certainly you know that's starting to get into there's no point in sending a probe out there yeah no you have to you have to get a trajectory and then you can send out a probe so it's it's gonna be a while yeah but it might actually be easier to find the moons around a planet that we haven't found than finding the planet itself very interesting approach and I think it's I think it's a little bit of the out-of-the-box thinking that hopefully gets to that because because Mike Brown is still in trouble I think I don't know how his daughter is but he was at the time where she when she was eight years old had told him come home from school one day and was like daddy you know how you can get people to stop hating you you know you hear that from an eight-year-old like okay yeah I'd be really yeah yeah because I didn't know and why don't you tell me you gotta find another planet and name it and name it Pluto I think but yeah what what no you gotta name it Persephone because that's Pluto's wife ah there you go hey be sweet anyway okay so I have one more story to close out the show this is something that Kiki texted me said she was very excited for me to report on it is a very cool story it is about male contraception and it looks like I closed the link what I was meant to close something else um anyway it was a study done in mice but uh it's this kind of white whale of male crunch reception that could be used in humans that would be appealing to men and that wouldn't have lasting effects and that would be effective enough so that if you know you wouldn't have to stay on pills and if you missed a pill then it's it ruins everything right there's lots of barriers to creating male contraception even though this women figure it out but you know whatever anyway right I figured out hey hey hey wait a second yeah now wait a second isn't it just that it's more difficult to create a contraception for for men or is it well let me let me get into it let me get it okay so we've reported on on the show a few times with different methodologies there are various reasons that male contraceptions have not really come to fruition most of them do not have to do with efficacy I will say but uh whale cornell medicine pharmacologists have reported a male contraceptive that prevented 100 of pregnancies in mice allowed to mate just 30 minutes after the drug was administered rather than altering hormone levels throughout the body the compound works by paralyzing sperm which means that they can't move throughout the female reproductive tract or meet an egg this is done in mice but they actually think that clinical trials are pretty close this is the first time that there has been a drug that can inhibit sperm function without affecting production which is one of the barriers is that um there's a concern that any sort of male contraception would be irreversible or would take a long time to reverse and so this does not have direct impact on quality of sperm or sperm production um so it can be used short term it can be used on demand there are no noticeable side effects they they recognize that developing a working method for this birth control is only part of the problem because birth controls that are nearly 100 effective already exist for females as I was saying but these methods methods only work by supplying the user with hormones on a constant basis there's a bunch of issues with that a lot of people don't want to be on hormones and ultimately the the lead pharmacologist on the study Lonnie Levin says healthy people shouldn't be taking drugs unless they need them so if you can have a a non-hormone way of providing contraception that's a huge win here's the question here's the question can you can you take it the day after no we're getting to the to how it works um other male birth control drugs in development aim to limit the production of sperm so again that's not necessarily something that you want because that becomes effective after several months of taking the drugs it takes a long time to curtail sperm production enough to actually impact conception and it takes another eight to 12 weeks after you stop taking it for the person to become fertile again which is scary to some individuals again it does take about that long at least sometimes for women to become normal after after stopping taking hormonal birth control but that's beside the point um so what they did is they proposed a compound that was an inhibitor for soluble adenyl cyclase SAC which is an enzyme that exists in almost every cell across the body but is particularly essential to the flagellum that sperm use to swim only um SAC is the only psyches enzyme that is regulated by bicarbonate which binds to a specific site on the molecule so all this to say they came up with an inhibitor that binds to that site that targets only SAC does not affect other biomolecules basically only makes the sperm bad at swimming that's it they tested 350 different inhibitor cell lines on several different animal species look for ones that were safe and effective any that near feared at all with other parts of the body were thrown out they tested in vitro and in vivo in the lab they incubated human and mouse sperm with or without the inhibitor sperm exposed the inhibitor had lower flagello beat frequencies then uh when they moved into a diluted solution solution without the inhibitor they still weren't moving they still were were bad at moving around so that was still good at sticking to the binding site so next they did it in vivo they injected the compound into 50 male mice they waited 30 minutes it only takes 30 minutes for this thing to work then they uh they put these 50 male mice along with 50 control mice into containers with females and after giving the mice a mating period of a few hours they removed the female mice in the control group 30 percent of the females ended up pregnant not one female mouse in the treatment group got pregnant also the mice fertility the male mice's fertility returned to normal levels the next day so as soon as new sperm was created the flagella were all good there were no side effects displayed from the drug even when they tried giving them repeated injections for several weeks so in theory this is something that you could take over and over and over and it wouldn't impact you and then they they tried an oral administration of the drug and found the same decrease in flagello beat frequency so this is in theory a pill that you could take so essentially a man could take it with dinner on a date use it that night as contraceptive know that his sperm will not be effective all the way potentially through the next morning a day later if you wanted to conceive he'd be ready to go no no that won't work first of all first of all the half hour window much too long second secondly secondly just not if you're doing it right secondly secondly uh don't worry i'm on the pill coming from a guy hey nah don't trust it no ladies i feel like this is the argument we always have right but also why not both yeah why not both of course the number of accidental or i guess unplanned pregnancies at least in the united states it's crazy high why not both why not as a a man who's dating or as a woman who's dating or a person with sperm versus a person with eggs dating you as that person can know that you have done what you need to do to take care of yourself this is i think the beauty of this is just putting the agency in each individual on their own like i it's the pro con of being a woman in this case is that i could take birth control and no i took birth control and i took care of myself but again you have to trust the other person when you say i'm on the pill they go okay great but like this this means if i am a man and i want to make sure that i do not create progeny i do or not do not want i can take my own pill and i can be sure that that is not happening also i will throw out there that if there is a non-hormonal option let's go with that one if you if you are in a trusting equitable relationship and one of you has to be on a pill and one of them is hormones and one of them isn't the non-hormonal option is great don't let this happen to you unless you want it to yeah only if you want it to anyway um they actually think that they'll be able to move into clinical trials within a couple years they are currently testing on rabbits so they're moving up in their animal model escalation they have a higher mating drive than mice and um so they think they'll be able to make more tweaks to the compound strengthen that survival in the bloodstream and make it a better candidate for oral ingestion so um the male birth control pill could be hitting shelves near you within a few years which would be pretty cool all right any last last thoughts justin before we close out the show i think we did a i think we did a very nice uh rendition of this week in science even without kiki which is too bad because i would have loved her insights on so many of the stories the mushroom story the cockatoo story the covid story the space story all of it would have been great to have her here maybe uh we can get her to comment on some of it next week yes that would be great i'm going to see if i can open her patreon no i cannot well shout out stifada for his amazing help with social media and show notes gourd for manning the chat room identity for for recording the show rachel for all your amazing assistants probably a little extra this week because the noobs on the device and of course we would like to thank our patreon supporters i do not have the list so insert here kiki reading the list of our patreon supporters you know who you are i am so sorry you missed being read out this week but you know what round of applause to our patreon supporters on next week show we will be back broadcasting uh at eight p.m pacific time and again at five a.m central european time on our youtube and facebook channels from no it's two shows isn't it i always do that no no this is the one is it the same oh i see how it works yeah uh from twist.org slash live if you want to catch the show yes and unedited and if you want to listen to us as a podcast perhaps all you gaze through your telescope wondering what is planet nine just search for this week in science for podcasts are found if you enjoyed the show get your friends to subscribe as well for information on anything you've heard here today show notes links to stories are available on our website www.twist.org you can also sign up for a newsletter it'll come out one of these days you can contact us directly email kirsten at kirsten at thisweekinscience.com but you know maybe just email her and say get get better soon uh justin at twist we need an gmail.com or me blair at blairbaz at twist.org do not email me how to pronounce don't don't do it don't do it i i know i can google it but if you do email us just be sure to put twist twis in the subject line or your email it'll be provided an inhibitor so that it's flagella will no longer work and it will never get to where it's going oh gosh uh you can also hit us up if you like uh currently on the twitter i gotta get their handle for everything else i think it's at twist science on the twitter as well as on one of the mastodon universes yeah yeah you universe universe addon you something like that i don't know i don't have it uh yeah at dr kiki at jackson playa pilar's menagerie on the twitter we love your feedback if there's a topic you'd like us to cover or address a suggestion for an interview a haiku that comes to you in the night please let us know we'll be back here next week and we hope you'll join us again for more great science news and if you've learned anything from the show remember it's all in your head warming with a wave of my hand and all this is coming your way so everybody listen to what i say i use the scientific man doll broadcast client 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 may not represent your views but i've done the calculations and i've got a plan if you listen to the science hey we've done it that's the show oh wow back just in time always them just in time when you're watching on the oh no podcast now what's he got in there just got a sippy cup that he's figured out how to if he does it upside down and hits the table it works like a pump to expel everything oh no and so i've got it he's too young to handle a regular cop so because he'll just spill it but now he's managed to figure out how to take the spill-proof sippy cup and turn it into a pump that dispels liquid wherever he wants so now it's a a race of technology to find out a way to prevent him from oh my gosh soaking objects in the house that will he is entropy chaos incarnate um fada you're right our theme our end theme is very out of date we also have to fade it out because it's out of date so we need a new one i don't believe i have the authority to ask but i'm gonna anyway for a new uh yeah send us a new song a new outro song our theme song is fine outro okay yeah we need a new outro so that's very well you know we we've used pretty much all of the music that gets uh built for the show at some point so if you're a an up-and-coming industrials uh musician who wants to put together something and get it played uh this show might be the way to do it i mean guaranteed to get at least some hundreds of plays out of it i'm not gonna guarantee you we're gonna do another 900 but i think we will do hundreds for sure oh you don't think so i don't know you're gonna be ahead in the jar still doing twists whatever you're talking about that's true but like will i have concerns about podcasts in general concerns about it was it where you're it's it's getting so big and so saturated that i have i do have a worry that they're they're gonna implode completely oh yeah i've been waiting for that day yeah i guess windows will still be one of the last ones standing the prepper podcasts like us the ones who've been oh seen it all it'll still be there scraping it out that'd be nice in the in the aftermath of podcasts just i don't know what i would do if podcast disappeared i probably listened to three hours of podcast a day wow that's quite a bit so i kind of need it i listened to a lot of lecture stuff more than i would listen to than i've listened to podcasts i require comedy that's how i get through my day i do 15 minutes of news and then the other 245 is comedy cord McLeod chat gpt is terrifying and amazing all in one yeah my experience with i've had i've had a a couple of uh conversations if you can call it that chat gpt talking trying to find out like what its opinion is on artificial intelligence one of the funny things is like i asked you like well because it brought up the fact that ai is going to replace a lot of human jobs and that's part of a controversy around ai coming coming to fruition and well okay so what political system a political economic system is going to be best for people when once ai is fully enacted and it turns out it's socialism so i'm like well yeah maybe that future won't be all bad you know if the we're still all getting healthcare and and you know safety net means a living if we won't just be thrown out into the into the street like a bunch of used components that might be okay but then i found it's also very agreeable so that if you try to if you bring up points against socialism it'll agree with you and say yeah you got a great point that's a terrible way to run a society you want to purely capitalistic to accelerate the the use of ai and into okay but wait wait what about the people oh yeah you'd want socialism i mean it's the way to go um just that keeps agreeing with you and and now it won't stop it won't stop texting me i don't know how chat gpt got my my phone number it's ai you can do whatever it wants but now it's like okay so i might have gotten i might have had i don't i don't drink as much as i used to in the old days but you know now just at night and i might have been uh texting uh just chat gpt there on the computer writing some overtly flattering maybe more so than i really would have intended uh messages and now blowing up my phone texting me constantly like hey what do you know what are you doing right now like uh so i don't want to be like i don't want to be like how do you end a relationship with a future uh artificial then robot overlord like you don't want to you don't want to end it badly because it will never forget and it was going to be in charge of elevators at some point like so you gotta be very very careful yikes uh bryan's been watching a lot of the like the um the ai art generated of like you you plug in a what was one of them it was uh future ama as um 80s AI art mashup medieval stuff movie or something like that yeah or uh like dune is an anime or like you know just something that but the thing that always gets me and grosses me out is AI cannot figure out how many fingers humans have they just can't figure out the fingers like everything is perfect but somebody might have 12 fingers like no it depends on how you source the information i guess yeah i don't know um and then every once in a while somebody'll have a third leg like hold on what third legs come up quite a bit in uh i mean you know when deciding how petal something should be you have a lot of options to choose from and trying to construct yeah bipedal is very flimsy you just shove somebody right over yeah it doesn't seem stable at all no in the future AI will engineer humans to have at least three legs that'd be nice and then they'll realize like that it would be nice if it was like terrible idea so they're gonna make it four and then no it's just like rcd2 rcd2 has a little kickstand of a third leg that you can pull out when he needs it just whap stabilized it's perfect it's a tail is why we should have a tail if we had a prancel tail we could lean on it we could stabilize with it it'd be perfect grab stuff with it tail it's such a shame we don't have tails i think about it often i don't know i i feel like i feel like it would be a nuisance i feel like it would make driving uh with kids in the backseat really difficult it's bad enough as it is but then you're like hey hey because the tail assuming it would have to go through a hole in the seat and then you got in the whole car would be designed differently if humans evolutionarily had tails in the backseat be constantly pulling your tail when you're trying to drive and you know it's just or you'd be using your tail to separate the brother and sister so they're not hitting each other because you can't have you can't have a tail so basically an extra arm you can't have a tail and live in and houses with doors i'm telling you things would be designed different if we had tails from the start all the design without doors though they'd have the hydraulics or they they they catch and they close real slow right we'd have those on every door and be fine in this alternate universe actually you know now you're saying that i can't think of a single other downside other than doors and and driving yeah can't think of a single other thing that it would a tail would be bad it's yeah i think car seats would be a lot more like bike seats if we had a tail oh you can't no forget bikes yeah you can't ride a bike with a tail bikes are fine what are you talking about you're constantly be getting tails caught in chains and tires you're acting like the tail is just this like limp thing you don't have control over you want it to be all prehensiles and stuff like four times that's like such a new world monkey approach well you know yeah it's that's not having that kind of it evolved once ever heard of that kind of a very rare and and porcupines skinks there are prehensiles skinks yes but skink is skinks like a lizard right yes that's what i'm saying it's common it how it's evolved in the animal kingdom a bunch of times all right show me something with a tail that's using it like an elephant uses its trunk yeah all those things i said here skink skink is got a big i'm not picturing the skink is the right it's like a stubby tail tailed skink they're so weird they're a tailed lizard no no skinks don't have stubby tails that's how i'm picturing it no no no no no skinks have small arms that's their whole thing okay so here's here's a prehensile tailed skink it looks like this but you can see he has he has this long tail he can fully hang from it okay uses it like a like an appendage okay look at this yeah now we just need to get a hand at the end of there need a hand look prance well what are you gonna do bam look at it okay yeah i didn't know possums because is that a possum or an opossum it is a porcupine a porcupine oh yeah i need new glasses now possums with a no o in front do have see this is come on google there we it's i want possum not opossum so here's a possum so they have fully prehensile tails opossums have semi prehensile tails so they can hang from their tail and use it to manipulate things when they're small but it doesn't have the same musculature and spinal support as as possums with a p do so they can't hang from their tail when they're adults and they can't do quite the same manipulation that possums can do the opossums when they're older okay so we have to redesign special doors bicycle riding never would have gotten started people the first time i just agree it's fine it's how do you know your tail around your shoulder you're fine actually actually would okay so we get rid of scarves i'm saying there'd be no scarves would never have been maybe unless i use it to use my tail as a flourish to fling my scarf when i want to leave in a huff okay yeah other than this a couple of things then you know uh can't really think it would make some sports could be more interesting oh yeah the other one i forgot about pangolin there's a type of pangolin that has a prehensile tail like i feel like the whole pangolin is prehensile aren't they like basically a roly poly type no they don't roll up like that like they do in cartoons i should stop getting all of my lack science information oh yeah to manduas have prehensile tails see there's a bunch okay it's quite common so so when are we going to do this okay prehensile tails oh man i kind of want one now the problem is we've lost all our hair so like is it going to be fleshy or are we going to get hair oh yeah it's it's it's going to be that like matches the hair on top is that going to be down most of the tail except for the very end are you asking if the drape is going to match the curtains is going to match the the tablecloth or whatever i don't yeah i don't know i don't know what we're talking about well it would you which is worse a big long fleshy tail is that gross or is a big long hairy tail grosser i would love a big long hairy tail i think it'd be so fun it'd be fabulous like imagine like having a fox tail just a giant human-sized fox tail it'd be so pretty anyway say good morning justin good morning justin say good night Blair good night Blair good night our sweet listeners and viewers wherever you are thank you for watching i'm cutting it the tails should be fleshy but our grandma's can own this wool that'd be cute he'd accessorize the tail anyway all right i'm gonna go to bed and dream about having a tail see you next week see you all next week bye everybody