 We are going live. Livity, Livity, Livity, Live. We are live. This is this week in science, and we are back. We are here today. We are here. We're gonna talk about the science. Justin is putting up the one more second finger again. Oh, wait a minute. What? What do you mean an unknown error occurred? Oh, no. Everything is under control. It's under control. Everything is under control. Is just fine. Everything's okay. Everyone, if you are watching this video right now, then you are watching the live broadcast of the this week in science podcast in which we're doing all the things, all the talking, and sometimes our computers don't work, and sometimes I have to edit things out for the actual podcast. So this is where all of the dirty laundry gets aired. You're watching that now. Hey, Blair and Justin, are you ready to do a show? Yeah. My dog just caught a bunch of stuff to fall over and go bang, but everything's fine now. So I'm ready. I fall over and go bang sometimes, too. Don't we all? Okay. Let's start this show. We'll get it on the road in a three. Two. This is twist. This week in science episode number 780. Is it 83 or is it 84? Hold on. Last week was 83. Why did I put 83 in my thing today? It's 84. It was a good show last week. I keep that show going. Justin, I thought you were saying like, yeah, that was a good show. We're done for the night. We're done. Good job. Get it. Okay, starting the show again. That's getting edited out in three, two, this is twist. This week in science episode number 784, recorded on Wednesday, July 29th, 2020. How to know a narcissist. Hi there. I'm Dr. Kiki and tonight on this week in science, we will fill your head with mosquito bites, poop and Vikings. But first. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. The world is a really big place. Wherever you go, the longer you are gone, the stronger the longing is to go home again. As a little girl with a dog once said, there's no place like home. There's no place like home. There's no place like home. And yet, in the aftermath of a pandemic stay at home orders, many are clicking their heels in hopes of being able to go any place but home, any place but home, any place but home. But as long as my monkeys and virulent viruses are still in the air, we must stay put until the epidemic passes. Meanwhile, we treat you to an assortment of interesting discoveries found behind the curtain of this week in science coming up next. I've got the kind of mind that can't get enough. I want to learn new discoveries that happen every day of the week. There's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek. Good science to you, Kiki and Blair. And a good science to you too, Justin Blair and everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of this week in science. We are back to fill your head with science. We are back to discuss discoveries, to be curious, to be cantankerous. Maybe I don't know or just plain nice and have an enjoyable time. I hope you enjoy the show today. Tonight, today tonight I have stories about Alzheimer's blood. I have a story about narcissists and I would like to talk to you about poop. Always a fascinating topic. Always. Justin, what do you have? I have a hundred million year old life form, mysterious magnetars, viking viruses and microbiomes versus malnutrition. That would be interesting. Very interesting. And Blair, what is in the animal corner? I have mosquitoes and thumbs and then I have a couple of quick stories about AI and dogs. I'm just thinking those thumbs are really great for smashing mosquitoes. Yeah. Or mosquitoes might really like to bite them. No. No. Stay away from my thumbs. Mosquitoes, I need those for doing things. Alright. Are we ready to dive into the show? If you are ready to dive into the show, yes. Well, let me remind you first that you can subscribe to this week in science on YouTube, on Facebook and on just about every podcast platform there is out there. Look for this week in science. You can also visit our website at twist.org, TWS.org. But now, yes, it's time for the science hot off the presses. Are you ready? NASA's heading back to Mars with the Perseverance rover and its hitchhiking helicopter called Ingenuity. Tomorrow, hopefully its launch window is between 7.50 to 9.50 a.m. eastern time tomorrow, Thursday, July 30th, 2020. And so if you are on the West Coast, that's fairly early in the morning. But if you're up for the launch, hopefully everything will go well and it will be on its way to the red planet to arrive February 18th, 2021. So it's going to be a long trip between Earth to Mars. But fingers crossed that everything goes well, that the weather is beautiful and that it's able to launch. If you remember our interview with NASA JPL geologist Fred Kaleff, Mapperwocky on Twitter, he told us about the Perseverance rover and how it's going to poop out little samples and leave them on the surface of Mars for a future mission to come pick up and return them to Earth. I really like the idea of Perseverance ingenuity and curiosity all being there because this is like the three, like you always are asked at a job interview. What are three adjectives to describe yourself as an employee? Perseverance ingenuity and curiosity. And then now people who are doing the hiring, they can say, oh, you're just like the Mars rovers. The little rovers that could, yes. It'll be very exciting. Be more like a Mars rover. There you go. And seriously, I mean, be well engineered to persist and not break down and be able to outlast your predicted mission end date. That's what the Mars rovers that we make seem to do. And if something doesn't work, just smack it with a shovel. I'm sure it'll be fine. Totally fine. Hey, Justin, tell me about those 100 million year old microbes. I just ruined it. That was the whole, that was the story. That's it. That's 100 million year old microbes. Okay, so it's my turn now, right? What's the story? So, yeah, 100 million years ago, the moon went around the Earth. Dinosaurs roamed the land. Fish swam in the seas and microbes were everywhere. It's just outside of dinosaurs, pretty much the way things are today. But for less than 100 years, humans have been collecting sediment samples under the ocean. These samples are collected to help us understand how the climate has changed over time. It is to monitor the nefarious activities of plate tectonics, as well as help us study the ecosystem of life forms at the bottom of the ocean. Apparently, yeah, these samples can also come alive. This is published in Nature Communications. Researchers reveal that given the right food and the right conditions in the laboratory, microbes collected from sediments as old as 100 million years were revived and multiplied, despite being dormant since the age of the dinosaurs. They used a drill ship to collect numerous sediment cores 100 meters deep into the seafloor. From the South Pacific Guides, this is a part of the ocean with the lowest productivity, least nutrients available to fuel any sort of a food web. They've discovered that oxygen was present in all of the cores, suggesting that if sediment accumulates slowly on the seafloor at a rate no more than a meter or two every million years, oxygen will penetrate all the way down from the seafloor down to the basement. So all the dirt to the bottom of the ocean to you at bedrock, I guess, will have some oxygen in it. So these conditions make it possible for aerobic microorganisms, those that require oxygen, to survive at these insane timescales of millions of years. Yeah, this is with their, with their, they fine-tuned some laboratory procedures, which doesn't go into here, but scientists led by Yuki Murano, the Japan Agency for Marine Earth Science and Technology, also known as Jamstek, which happens to be oddly, that happens to be my old DJ name. Jamstek. Yeah. So they incubated the samples and got the, they got them to grow, demonstrating that these weren't just fossilized remains of microbes, but actually still alive, capable of growing, dividing. He was, Murano initially says he was taken aback by the results, quotey voice of Murano. At first I was skeptical, but we found that up to 99.1% of the microbes in sediment deposited 101.5 million years ago, were still alive and were ready to eat. They didn't eat the microbes. The microbes themselves were hungry. They were ready. The microbes were ready to eat. I do believe he means that the microbes are. The newly developed ability to grow, manipulate and characterize ancient microorganisms. With this research team is now looking forward to applying similar approach to other questions about the geological past. According to Murano, life for microbes on the subsea floor is very slow compared to life above it. And so with that slow speed, evolutionary speed of these microbes is also going to be slower. He says, we want to understand how if these ancient microbes evolved, this study shows that the subsea floor is an excellent location to explore the limits of life on Earth. I find interesting that if they have barely evolved in 100 million years, that's an amazing snapshot of 100 million year old microbial life. Granted at the sea floor, and maybe these only related to other microbes that you will find in the sea floor, but it's still an amazing snapshot. Any sort of a life form that has barely evolved and still stayed alive for this 100 million year time, really it would be interesting to study. I think it gets at the question of what is the minimal amount of metabolism that's required to maintain life. So to keep it in this hibernating state maybe or this very low energy use state, what allows these organisms to do that? And can we take any of those lessons and apply them to us? Do they scale up to larger organisms or is this just a, this organism is so simple that it really doesn't need much to be maintained? Yeah, very interesting. Yeah, really interesting questions. Yeah, I was wondering also about this whether they're really sure that their samples weren't contaminated and that these really are really old organisms? Like bacteria that they're growing and they're not just like, oops, we got something on the drill and that contaminated our samples. I would hope that they tried to avoid that, but it's a question. I'm sure that they didn't publish without at least swabbing a drill. Let's just compare. I hope. You can always hope. Yeah. Hey Blair, what you got there? Oh, just an update on service dogs for people with PTSD and what services they are actually rendering. So we know that in general, their large tests that have been done to find that service dogs are helpful to people with PTSD. But do we know if it's service dogs in particular or just having a dog in general and what exactly are they doing? So this study does show this from Purdue University that using and benefiting the specific trained tasks that service dogs are given set them apart from pet dogs or emotional support dogs. They are doing something very different. And what specific task is used the most often and which is the most helpful with problems with PTSD is actually the task of disrupting episodes of anxiety. So on average, the dogs trained, they both alerted the veteran to increasing anxiety and provided physical contact during anxiety episodes that interrupted it. And so they were, they were mainly helping interrupt or prevent these anxiety episodes. And the dogs and the dogs are trained to recognize those better than just a pet dog. Right. And respond to them in a very specific way. Yeah, absolutely. And so they do other things like they help with nightmares. They are hyper or in public, apparently a big thing. If you have PTSD is feeling nervous and crowds are in public spaces. And so dogs will actually look the opposite direction that you're looking. So it kind of feels like you have somebody is looking behind you. So you have all of your, your areas covered. Nobody's going to sneak up behind you. And they, they help with risk taking, they help with amnesia issues, but this number one thing was preventing anxiety and disrupting anxiety episodes. That's fantastic. I mean, I know pets in general can be good for calming people. Like blood pressure. Yeah. And can help just generally with those levels, but it's really interesting to know that dogs that are trained specifically for this do, they are helping. They have a benefit and the things that they do. Yeah, they, they matter. That's really, that's just, I mean, it's obvious once you've heard it that they've been trained this way, but it's brilliant to train a dog to sense your anxiety and then want pets. Right. You're being the reassuring one and you've got your best friend by it. It's perfect. Or it can be as simple as providing intense physical contact, like leaning up against you and putting their head in your lap. Yeah. So that can be really helpful. But I think, so this is really important just to know the benefit of service dogs, but it once again highlights the difference between pets and emotional support animals and service animals. And being very clear about that, because the second that, that, that, that kind of line becomes blurred. It can prevent people from bringing real legitimate service animals into spaces because people are bringing pets into those spaces and abusing those rules. So that is an important thing to remember here as well. Isn't that basically in the same category of getting into a wheelchair to go to like a sporting event to get a better seat? I mean, it's, isn't it like that's just, that's just wrong people and you can't really. You're cheating the system. You're finding loopholes in the system. I want to bring my dog with me versus my dog prevents anxiety attacks. Those are two completely different things. It's parking in a handicapped spot with somebody else's placard. Right. It's just, it's just like dirty. It's not, it's not. Yeah, it's just bad. Gary in the chat room says even cats. Wait a cat, I feel like a cat would just like escalate anxiety. Like you'd get anxious and be like, It's not reassuring cat. To my knowledge, cats have not been trained to prevent complications from PTSD or no, they haven't. So they don't care. They just don't care about you. Cats are a little harder to train. It's just because they don't care about you. That's not true. But we won't get into that debate right now. Something else that's reassuring. Reassuring is a new possible test for Alzheimer's that's being developed. A study that was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. JAMA this week suggests that a simple blood test could predict Alzheimer's disease as much as 20 years before the onset of disease. That it finds the marker in the blood up to 20 years ahead of actual symptoms. The test would measure levels of one of the tau proteins. It's commonly found in Alzheimer's brain tangles. It's called phospho tau 217 or p-tac. And while this is not yet ready for clinical use, the tests that they have done so far, looking at different groups of people in places in Sweden, in, I think, believe, Arizona and Columbia, the researchers are optimistic from the results they've had. So, especially if you have genetically, a genetic predisposition, a familial predisposition for Alzheimer's disease, a test like this is going to be a little bit different. So, if you have really good blood test for Alzheimer's, this could help you get your blood test done correctly. And then it's possible for Alzheimer's to make it ready for use in a couple of years. So, we look at this blood test a lot. If you have a really good blood test and if you have a really good blood test, it can help you get a lot of blood tests. And if you have a very good blood test that is going to help you. know where you are kind of in the before symptoms occur and if what we what we know so far about treatment is the earlier you start treatment the longer you can keep the tangles from really taking form in the brain and so it keeps the main the the major symptoms from really kicking in until much later in the disease and so if you catch it early you can prevent it that's what I was going to say is my first question too yeah didn't he do anything with that information or just like hanging over your head yeah if they would just said you're you're gonna get Alzheimer's in 20 years I'm not sure I'd want to know right I don't really need to know that right now it's a lot two years or just a couple months before it really starts to happen don't tell yeah well because also then it then you know we get a you get a thing like that hanging over your head uh and now I just forgot my car keys again uh forgot where I put them again is that Alzheimer's is that just forgetting where you put your keys it's just your brain slowing down as you get older right no too many things to pay attention to your brain isn't paying attention to where you put your keys I think I think I did that more than when I was young than I do when I'm old well I got a hook now that I put but anyway that's not the point but the idea is you'd be second guessing like is this just normal thing that happened or is this uh disease now happening and and it means like too much to to know if there wasn't a reason like treating it there's a reason yes treating it the earlier you catch it the better the prognosis for longer uh what's oh speaking of death no yes do you have a death star what death star magnet a mystery of the universe has been solved at least one of the mysteries has been witnessed uh okay so this is fast radio bursts they're one of astronomy's sort of unsolved questions about the universe because they were discovered back in 2007 but these are these are quick pulses and radio waves just for a few milliseconds and then they fade away and they're only rarely if ever seen again from the same location their nature doesn't really it's not understood where they're coming from we have not observed any in the Milky Way uh with the known origin or emitting in any other kind of radiation beyond just radio way it's just bam we get these fast radio waves they're just they're blip and then that's it we don't know where it comes from there's a global collaboration of telescopes though that has detected a unique a unique mix of radiation bursting from a dead star in our galaxy it's coming from inside the galaxy something has never actually been seen before from this type of star uh which may be solving this mystery so the finding actually involves two kinds of uh cosmic phenomena magnetars and fast radio bursts the magnetars are these stellar remnants uh these have some of the most intense magnetic fields found anywhere in the universe when they become active they can produce these extremely short bursts of high energy radiation that lasts for less than a second but are a billion times more luminous than our sun a billion suns and it's gone just like that uh so okay so this is uh late april uh sgr 1935 plus 2154 uh it's a magnetar discovered six years ago and finally it had its big x-ray burst and so we started looking at it it became active again uh soon after a storm has spied something is stanching this magnetar was not only radiating those usual x-rays but radio waves as well this is the first time we've seen the thing this pinpointed a location aha that is what's emitting radio waves uh we detected the magnetars burst of high energy hard x-rays on the 20th of april says sandro metagetti of the national institute of astrophysics in Milan Italy she's the lead author on one of the studies that's at least being done about this they have this uh integral space telescope i think it's a european space agency uh space telescope it has a burst alert system so it immediately it catches these these rays coming coming through it immediately alerts observatories worldwide so it says aha signal everybody look and it also can pinpoint where directionally where those other telescopes should look uh so there was so the astronomers on the ground spotted a short and extremely bright burst of radio waves from that direction using the chime radio telescope in canada uh over the same time frame also this was independently confirmed a few hours later by the survey for transient astronomical radio emissions or stair two in the united states uh this is sandro again we've never seen a burst of radio waves resembling a fast radio burst from a magnetar before this is the this is the first ever observational connection between magnetars and fast radio bursts it truly is a major discovery and helps to bring the origin of these mysterious phenomena into focus connection strongly supports the idea that these fast radio bursts emit from magnetars dead stars uh throughout the universe demonstrates that these bursts from these highly magnetized objects can also be spotted at radio wavelengths so yeah very cool hmm i like how she says that too that's just throws a little pun in there bringing mysterious phenomena into focus i like it ha ha ha ha yeah that's cool very very cool blare what's your next story oh it's about ai used for birding um because birding is not just for people anymore no it's for computers now what um this new research demonstrates to the first time that artificial intelligence could be used to train computers to recognize individual birds something humans pretty much can't do unless they have some sort of discerning oh it must have been listening for a while if you get to know certain individuals for a long period of time i know that's why can't use me oh you mean individual birds with the same yeah you can tell oh but i heard about like different bird calls but no you're talking about like this this blue jay from that blue jay from that blue jay from that blue oh my goodness from kori from john yeah so oh my goodness um this one after one you're just supposed to like after one or two exposures to a bird identify that bird and be able to tell that bird from now on um so this is actually they showed that computers can consistently recognize dozens of individual birds even though we could not tell them apart humans couldn't do it in the same test in doing so the study provided a means of overcoming one of the greatest limitations of the study of wild birds right reliably recognizing individuals and so this is the the an automatic and non-invasive identification usually when we think about birding we think about banded birds a bird has to be caught to put an identifier on them so this is a non-invasive identification that for animals that are completely unmarked and unmanipulated and so this is a way to be able to monitor bird populations and individuals completely remotely without having to touch them what was do you remember this there was somebody who was uh that we had on show that was going to put bird listening stations like all over the like it ran like you could get one and put it up in your backyard and tie it to the internet and it would listen for bird calls and feedback that data that was it sounds like that would be a pretty cool match-up so anybody could grab like have like you put up your birdhouse but you also put up a little bird mic you got a little bird mic in the back well in this case you could put a little bird webcam it would be very fun to be able to uh you could have access to your own webcam your live cam of birds and then um the ai would have access to it as well yeah you know you know I just realized though uh this is coming for us it is technology if it already is here i mean yeah i think technology it's it's totally a thing yeah with uh oh i think nation recognition is is done this is bird recognition is much harder so far okay ai has been trained for human faces from day one yeah we've been we've been helping a actually actually skill we're like hey that's i'm tagging my friend in this picture on facebook i just told facebook what my friend looks like you know we but also uh amazingly uh because of who who programs it and who mostly utilizes it and who's most played with this it's much better at white male secondly uh white female faces than any uh any other ethnicity absolutely right yeah which is back to the back to the bird aspect though yeah being able to id birds without ever touching them is a potential it's a it that's a potential game changer for researchers who are trying to study birds it doesn't impact the birds behavior because getting misnetted and when you know you try and be as kind as possible to those birds as you get them out of the nets but sometimes they're tangled in there and you have to work really hard to be able to it's a stressful procedure for everyone involved not to mention if you're catching a bird on migration as people often do if you are causing them stress that might impact their migration ultimately we hope that it doesn't but if we don't have to have their adrenaline spike because they got caught for a second that might be better for them on their long trip yeah and uh and how does being caught and banded how does that affect survival in general for animals did it delay them did it separate them from their cohort we don't know did being stressed out keep them from realizing there actually was a predator around and so bob got eaten so so here's here's the really exciting part here's the really exciting part we can answer the the question that everybody has wanted to have answered for the longest time can birds actually sense earthquakes so if we have all these listening stations these individual birds and then you like tune into the ones that work him right you know the ai is watching and then the earthquake hits where the birds like hey you feel a little off today are they like tweeting a little anxious eating differently yeah acting a little more skittish anxiety yeah is there or they're just like what was that oh well i can fly no no i was flying at the time i didn't feel like what did i miss another earthquake every time what happens i'm flying never about one but i just yeah uh and it can certainly be really cool if it was like advanced enough so you could like pick a bird you know and then just track it like you can watch this see where how this bird's mood interactions have gone over weeks or months or a year yeah i wonder more about how they are gonna tell apart identical twins i mean i've seen those double yolk chicken eggs what's up with that so you don't think there's a little you don't think there's a uh a nurture involved in bird comb just telling well justin this is this is a this is all visual this is visual we're not you're the one who brought up the bird yeah you brought up oh no i thought they were identifying the by bird call no oh no this is just by by how they look by how they look recognizing individuals like that little bird's face is different from that little bird's face it's not as cool i disagree if they could identify them by by bird call that would be more impressive to to just this point about nature versus nurture um i do think that as long as they're not brand new baby chicks they should have some sort of discernible marks even if they are twins if it's a scratch on the leg or whatever it is that AI should in theory catch that yeah speaking of individuals have you ever worked with that person who just never seems to learn from their mistakes mm-hmm yeah well guess what they're a narcissist a study out of Oregon State University found that uh narcissists are they fail to learn from their mistakes because they refuse to acknowledge that they ever even made a mistake in the first place yes so most people uh do what's called counterfactual thinking this is the process of imagining a different outcome from what actually occurred and trying to figure out okay this thing didn't happen how can i could i have gone back and uh done it differently uh researchers however in this study they determined that narcissists don't do that so what narcissists end up doing is that they are more likely to uh in hindsight if they got something right feel that it was actually more foreseeable so like i knew it all along of course i was right and when they predicted outcomes incorrectly they felt the outcome what or people people who weren't narcissists felt the outcome or people who were narcissists felt the outcome was less foreseeable so if you're a narcissist narcissist your reaction to something is ah nobody could have guessed that would happen nobody's ever seen numbers like this before nobody's seen numbers like this before oh that's right uh so in and and this was published in the journal of management they say that narcissists often rise within ranks of organizations because they exude total confidence take credit for the successes of others and deflect blame from themselves when something goes wrong this can be damaging to organizations or countries because of low morale of employees who work for the narcissist and because the narcissist never learns from their mistakes and continues to make poor decisions so yes anyway how to know a narcissist they shirk responsibility never taking responsibility for their poor the poor outcomes of their decisions never saying that they actually made a mistake and they can't they can't say these things it's it is constant there's a constant drive to maintain that image of themselves they will attack others they will defend it they will make up they will lie they will do whatever it takes to maintain a a narrative for themselves uh of themselves as amazing the winner on top yes yes anyway if you just tuned in this is this week in science are you interested in a twist shirt or mug or face mask or other item of our twisty merchandise you can find that in our zazzle store go to twist.org and click on the zazzle link you'll find all sorts of neat products that will help support twists all right all right doot doot doot doot doot doot time for the COVID update COVID update COVID update COVID update I stay up late because I can't sleep anymore all right this week we've got some really interesting stories there is a COVID origin story now an international team of researchers reconstructed the evolutionary history of SARS-CoV-2 and determined that this viral lineage has been circulating in bats for decades since at least the 1960s wow the researchers see no need for pangolin intermediary although the spike protein might be adapted to infect both human and pangolin respiratory cells they also found no evidence of lab origin or accidental release from a laboratory well when I say how do they know that no accidental release that there are uh there are signs genetically of laboratory genetic manipulation that would have well yeah manipulation is one thing but a sample I mean this is this is the thing and I hate to fuel any conspiracy theory out there anywhere but there's no such thing as a secure biological facility that just don't exist like the the head of the head of uh the only person I ever met who was the head who was what met in person and talked to who used to be the head of the biology department at UC Davis when they're proposing building it building it what is it like a uh level four or five biolab containment yeah biocontainment facility he was like I there's no such thing who's this point blank he's like I'm against it I'd love to do that research in one but I'm telling you those things there's no such thing especially if you're talking about viruses there's no such thing is containable um even so if with all the strict regulations that I know we we try to put in place in the United States I'm not saying China's lax on regulations but they're lax on regulations I don't know that it would matter that they would sample the bat and it got out if it was already going to be able to infect people um I think it's more likely that you would you would interact with it where people are cutting up live bats and putting them next to other animals and I think the wet market still makes way more sense sense yeah but escape from a lab is also possible so if I may I don't I don't know the back story of how New York I don't know the backstory of how they ruled it out but I would I would hypothesize that perhaps this wasn't in a lab before that's the point is that if this wasn't a lab origin then therefore that means it wasn't cultivated in a lab before the outbreak and therefore it would not have been something that started there I would guess that that's yeah but I think I look at markers of mutation and like time time since time since it would have split from its next closest filigree related those shouldn't show up that fast but what they were talking about I think is like intentional manipulation to make a more because that's what the conspiracy thing is somebody like put this together in a lab with this other virus to make it worse they did not find evidence of that no and I think one of the you know one of the lead doctors who like you know was one of the first people coming out about this thing have been associated with the lab I'm just saying either way it got out but I don't think intentionally anything people study these things and lab security not like you know from nefarious groups but just lab security in terms of like not contaminating yourself your co-workers and then taking something outside of your shoes it's a lot harder than people might think yeah yeah we'll see oh back to school season is upon us I know some schools have already gotten started again distance learning in in places around the country but it's as it starting again many are wondering whether closing schools in response to the pandemic was a good idea in the first place right was it a good idea well there's an there's an yeah well you say that but some people are like what if kids don't spread it and if not a big deal and yes well there's a big deal you yes it is a big deal we understand this but some people have been debating it and it is an issue and it's a topic that's brought up a lot I've seen people bring it up a lot on social media and the question of how many lives does keeping kids out of school actually save and there's a new analysis in JAMA this week that suggests yes it was a very good idea and that closing schools was actually associated with a significant decrease in not just a number of deaths but also incidents they found that there was a decline in incidents of about 62 percent so that if the schools had stayed open there would have been 62 percent more incidents of cases possibly and that they and then 58 percent for mortality and in the model they found that it was associated with 128.7 fewer cases per 100,000 people in a population over 26 days and one and a half fewer deaths per 100,000 people in a population over 16 days so that can be calculated out based on different areas and how many people would have died in different population areas but yes school closings kept people alive and healthier. You know this reminds me of a lot of the climate change conversations that we have where like if we do what we're supposed to do and the temperature doesn't rise as much then people will be like ah see it didn't go as high you said it was going to go higher it's like well actually because we did the right thing this is like that right so we closed the schools kids didn't get sick and die so so see there is no problem no problem at all well in attempting to reopen the schools they went like look Denmark and Germany have reopened their schools yeah they also did a 90 shut down of society and have universal health care so they had and tested so like they had lots of testing yeah they had all the things that we didn't do that's allowing their societies to reopen um three weeks that's all we need 99% of us shut down for three weeks it'll be fine we can do it we can be over it'll be done we'll be done with this uh but yeah like uh you know wherever these locations are people who like are keep arguing for kids to go back to school or doing business as usual you know like I feel like going up to them and saying have you ever been right have you ever been consistently right about anything don't like stop offering your opinion you've not been right we've had any consistency over time about anything we you think these thoughts and you want to say these things to people but it's not going to help if you do it's not gonna just make people angry and defensive they're already insane what what I mean like no like what like what's the like people like oh no we gotta let them keep speaking their drivel and nonsense no we don't you're wrong you're wrong I will shout it to them you're wrong like maybe nobody's shouting it at them loud enough and that's the problem there's somebody else is shouting at them somebody else is shouting in there there's no problem there's no global warming there's and they're listening to that so we need to start shouting at these people that's the problem npr I'm sorry the npr voice the npr voice is not getting through to these people we have to change that but maybe we could tell them maybe we could tell them what the cdc reported this week that even among young adults aged 18 to 34 years with no chronic medical conditions so nothing that would make them get really sick right not one of the people with pre-existing conditions these are young healthy people nearly one in five reported that they had not returned to their usual state of health 14 to 21 days after testing for COVID so after being tested positive it was still two to three weeks after that that people young healthy people were still feeling the effects of this of this disease compare that to the flu which is under two weeks to go through the entire thing normally people who are young and healthy with no with no medical conditions you get the flu you're done with it you're back to your health in two weeks this is persistent that is another problem this is one of the things that I think you know we keep talking about but the average person maybe still doesn't understand is that a mild case a case that does not land you in the hospital could still have you sick for months yes for you know what I heard I heard uh it can make your hair fall out I heard that it's been giving psychological issues I heard it can cause heart infections um let me tell you about the the heart issues two studies out this week from Germany found evidence of heart damage in COVID patients the first looked at a sample of people whose average age was 49 years old so not too elderly not elderly at all no not elderly at all that's a really young age in some people's book and these people recovered at home so they were not so ill that they stayed in the hospital for their recovery these are people who had mild to moderate symptoms recovered at home looking at their hearts they found structural changes similar to what is seen after heart attack in these individuals there were ish heart issues persisting after COVID in the sample of people they looked at the other study looked at looked at people who had died and so these were autopsy heart tissue from uh people who were elderly around 85 years old on average they found high levels of the virus in the tissues of the heart so the virus is getting into the cells of the heart and and and really digging in there and having a really nice time replicating replicating little virus babies yes not good for us so but do they get out again I mean do they really escape what happens if they because in their lungs I get it they escape the cells and then they you sneeze or cough and then those those floating they get expelled what do they do when they escape from these cells in the heart oh maybe they go infect the liver maybe they go and get into other tissues in your body circulating in your blood and they're getting everywhere I feel like it's almost like the toxoplasma ending up in something other than a cat though you know like it it seems like it's in the wrong uh wrong place if it's in the heart I mean it do damage but it uh it it seems like that but as we talked about on a previous episode it seems as though the virus gets into the cells and reprograms cells to change structurally to really turn themselves over into replication machines there is a typical virus fed yes but it is it it's more extensive than other other viruses in the extent that it changes microtubules within the cell it changes cells it it changes cells what they're producing to more virus and it changes them structurally as well so there are all sorts of internal changes that are that we have yet to really understand the downstream effects of oh yeah and this week this week if you saw the video America's frontline doctors that's not a group that's not a thing they're backed by the tea party they were there's a video that has gotten no millions of views on facebook and other social media they stood in front of the white house in white lab coats talking about the importance of their ability to be able to use hydroxychloroquine to treat patients and they said they had so much evidence that it works okay it's a marketing campaign and i'm not really sure of the reasoning behind it aside from the possibility of being able to say come election time that certain politicians were you know wanted to make people healthy but because the medical establishment wouldn't let him give people hydroxychloroquine then people died so in a it's a it's a it's potentially a marketing campaign that yeah well it's also tied into a major donor to that administration also operates the company that's making the hydroxy but there's another study another study out this week it just seems like week after week this one finally call it a cure no another study in the new england journal of medicine found no benefit of hydroxychloroquine when used with or without azithromycin which is a common combination on mild to moderate symptom COVID-19 patients compared to standard care and now what a waste of time what a waste of time and effort and energy we have done in disproving something that was being encouraged that was dangerous for people to take over and over and over and there will be no admission of guilt or of being wrong you're right no my goodness but keep your eyes peeled everybody because no one could have known no one could have known right keep your eyes and ears peeled on social media do not just take what you see or hear at face value triangulation being able to find multiple sources that are credible trusted sources for information is incredibly important and we hope that you continue to come to this week in science to bring you some of that information and to link you to some of those very other very credible sources which is especially important if you're somebody like me I believe everything I read or hear so I am very selective about the sources that I listen to or read from because once I read it or hear it it's in there I can't get it out nope and the first yeah the first thing that said if it's misinformation you're probably going to remember that it's hard to erase that misinformation even if you have all the facts in the world this is this week in science I want to say thank you thank you for listening to twist every week with us you're the reason that we're able to do what we do bringing you up to date and down to earth views on science and discoveries and with your help we can do even more we can bring a sane perspective to a world full of misinformation head over to twist.org right now click on that patreon link and choose your level of support be part of bringing sanity and science to more people and we're back you're listening to this week in science is that what you're waiting for? Kiki you want to talk about poop I guess yeah I guess it's time to talk about poop let's talk about the good things and the bad things that you find in poop especially how those change as you get old last week we talked about factors in blood from people who exercise that can have beneficial effects on the brain this week I have a study out of the biomedical central microbiome journal that it talks it basically discovered that well they didn't discover this but as people age there's more bad stuff in their poop more bad bacteria than good bacteria and so they looked at taking this feces from elderly people and aged mice and then transferring it to doing fecal transplants on young mice so giving the young mice the old poop yes so it was like kind of backwards from what the studies usually are normally it's like how can we make older people younger let's take the young blood let's take the young poop this time it was like let's see what the old poop does to the young people well it turns out in mice the bacteria pain alkyl pain alkyl genes hominis and asheria coli e coli e coli um lead to cognitive impairment and colitis in young mice so when you transfer the feces from these old people and old mice it actually leads to brain detriments and gut issues well we know the microbiomes related to the brain right so that makes sense yeah not necessarily very you know shocking shocking what the next step that they did is they took the vagal nerve the vagus is a is a sympathetic nerve that it has inputs all over the place it's a major nerve but it's it goes down to the heart it can control it can control your your heart rate there is a branch that goes to the gut and there are other branches all over the place it controls your gut digestion they took that gut vagal nerve branch and they cut it and they found that for the pain alkyl genes hominis that cutting the vagal nerve stopped the cognitive impairment in the young mice for e coli it didn't have any effect the e coli were just they're doing something else but for the p hominis bacteria somehow and they think it's through what are called extracellular vesicles which are like little little sacks of messenger material little instructions that bacteria can send to each other they bud them out and they send them to each other that these extracellular vesicles that contain information may be getting into the vagus and traveling up the vagal vagal nerve into the brain and then causing the the cognitive impairments by infiltration of the hippocampus they found they found these these extracellular vesicles evidence of them in the hippocampus before the vagal nerve was cut but not after it was cut so so we knew that microbiome was related to the brain but we didn't know how and now we have an idea yeah so that there is the possibility at least with this one bacterial species that it is that its products are getting into the nerve that connects the gut to the brain and that's a track it's like a racetrack and they can just get an elevator a little elevator the brain and that once they get to the brain then they can have chemical effects these vesicles can then can then fuse with synapses with extracellular with receptors on the exterior of neurons and glial cells and potentially start to have actual effects that lead to the cognitive impairment that's seen so anyway older people with the potentially bad guts these your gut microbiome changes as you get older and it could be this pathway that leads to some of the cognitive declines that are seen with aging so the question is now how can I just get rid of all of my bad bacteria and give them to younger people no that's not what the question is I want to maintain maintain my my advantage over the youth how can we without cutting the vagal nerve connect connection to the gut right that would be right how can we reinforce or stop block the transmission of these products from the gut to the brain in older people yeah we must control the microbiome yeah so like what specifically is making it change and can we stop yeah yeah and can we stop it and it something else that was interesting about this is that not that the the different bacteria didn't act exactly the same so E. coli has something else going on still has effects but it it is not using the the vagal the vagus nerve to make it to the brain anyway anyway moving on from that story of the brain to the ears huh yeah did you hear me there you hear me what you hear me i'm gonna talk to you here what if okay so people who are hard of hearing or deaf can now use cochlear implants cochlear implants use electrical signals to take sound it gets turned into an electrical signal and that electrical signal is then through wires connected to the nerves in the ear and then those nerves are directly stimulated that's how cochlear cochlear implants work but the problem is there's other stuff in the inner ear that also uses electricity to conduct information and so in certain environments hearing can it gets kind of muddy and the cochlear implants don't work as well in certain environments because the electrical signals kind of get confused and so a group of researchers have just published in science translational medicine about cochlear implants that they are developing that take that that take sound and turn it into light instead of into electricity and in rats they used genetically modified rats that had the cells in their ears modified to take optogenetic signals so the blue light from the cochlear implants could then stimulate the nerve cells in the ear and it allowed the rats to hear so the sound is converted to light the light is then converted directly into neural impulses by the nerves that detect the light the changes in light now to be able to use this in people we can't just genetically modify people from birth like they do like they did for the rats in this experiment so that's going to take a bit more work to figure out how to how to implant it into people but they're pretty confident they're on a path to be able to develop cochlear implants for four people that will give better hearing that are based on light instead of electricity yeah which could be could be yeah it could be very cool to be able to hear anything to help help people sense their environment better so so this would be an improvement off of what cochlear implants usually do it would just the sound would be better yes so say in um environments where there are lots of people and there's a constant a constant sound instead of the sound being muddy you would be able to hear certain frequencies that you would be able to hear certain frequencies more clearly and things would stand stand out more like good hearing more like regular hearing as opposed to something that's damaged yeah and i mean until we can actually regenerate hair cells in the ear and actually get the ears hearing again these cochlear implants are one of the next best solutions for solving hearing loss do you want to talk about dreams i can go quickly into it i was gonna see if i had time for it but there's this the story about out of mit that i find really fascinating the researchers in mit have developed a device they're calling it the dormio device and it's for tracking sleep and they took the dormio device and it's it's a device that sits on your hand and it tracks electrical impulses of your brain in order to be able to track the stages of sleep that you're in the researchers who developed this at mit they were able to take this information and connect it up to a system to manipulate your dreams so when you get into the very first earliest stages of sleep the onset of sleep which they call the hypnagogic state they use a script that is it's connected to an app on in your phone and your phone will through through the device be able to start the program it it it figures out what stage of sleep you're in if you're in the hypnagogic hypnagogic state it will then start the script that says are you asleep and then you can answer the question and then it it primes you with certain words that you want to be primed with to induce a a more creative thought state and so the researchers looked at people they had a lot of people in a couple of different experiments where the the different words that they used they they would tell people to think about a tree and when people were thinking about the tree in this hypnagogic state as opposed to a waking state they had much more creative answers and it led to more creative directions in the way that they thought and the researchers are trying to develop this now as a way to manipulate this dream state to assist people in how they in how they achieve creativity would you use this device what's really amazing is tonight jam stack which was my little dj name came up imagine ghanak state was the dj group i was a part of that that's really cool so okay so obviously uh implications for treating ptsd uh like right off the bat like as so many things uh are um what was that there was a picture of like a some sort of jackal jumping at a human in that study yeah i don't know if i would agree to crazy dreams on so so it's not hard i prefer not to dream so so this is okay but if so say but say you had a problem that you were working on and many people use sleep as a way to work through problems is like okay i'm gonna sleep on it right and somehow your brain works things out while you're sleeping but what if you wanted to do that more consciously tap into that state but at the same time be more conscious of what occurred and so you know you could have the system prime you to work on camping trip or you know whatever it happens you try to solve the problem like this is what i want to know is does doing this affect the restorative power of the sleep that you have potentially because you're because you but you're interrupting the progression of sleep stages and what this what this does is it's kind of hypnotic in the sense that it keeps you in that first stage of sleep and doesn't allow you it because it keeps uh the because the the app keeps pinging you with prompts you are asleep think of a tree did you think of a tree you know as it keeps monitoring your brain state and if you want to stay in that state to continue your creative process it's going to keep you there and not let you progress to the later stages so this might be something that you would use for a nap time yes or maybe it's just your weekend creative thinking time and you want to try this instead i feel i don't know this is probably just coming from my personal state where i'm right now just really tired all the time but i do not want to mess with my sleep processes right now like that right now right now that's my question is how different is this this is a perfect example because this happened just a couple days ago i fell asleep to a two and a half at the beginning of a two and a half hour interview with uh samy the bulger vano uh uh and in my dream as i fell asleep as in my dream he's still there talking he's still there talking and and and i don't think it's even like some of it is on script from what he's talking about and i think some of the conversations we're having have nothing to do but it's all in his voice for the rest of the and the thing ends i'm sure i was asleep for a long time i was having this dream right when i woke up many many hours later i was still like me and sam you're cruising around in my old thunderbird car for some reason talking about like the old neighborhood he was talking about this restaurant over here this thing happened over here he's but it was like how much how different is this from just uh having audio prompts and uh as a maybe it's just maybe i'm because i'm kind of a lucid dreamer like the outside kind of filters in anyway and i remember dreams i don't know if that is is part of maybe i'm stuck maybe i don't sleep past the first stage of sleep i don't know now i want to go do dream study or it's possible that uh because you did that while you were uh you were listening that one time maybe that that kept you in that state that particular dream state and didn't it kept your brain active as as opposed to letting you go into deeper stages of sleep i don't know maybe uh fata no actually the thing about sammy is that he never talked back in the day this is the first interview he did in like 25 years man has never spoken that's that was the thing about sammy he didn't believe in speaking he got stuck with godi who was a constant talk anyway he said the he did this guy did 22 and a half years in prison he said the worst they said what was the worst prison he ever went to it's actually it wasn't a bad prison it was the 11 months i was locked up with with godi john godi where he never stopped talking and complaining about being in jail having been a gangster his whole life 11 months and the guy never stopped complaining that was the worst anyway i'm sorry i'm way upset and talking and talking at least that's what he said in my dream i don't know i should go back and watch the interview yeah uh but i find i find this a fascinating device with fascinating potential like you bring up ptsd and being able to delve into uh aspects of your creativity and your and your psyche but i wonder how deep it goes we know that hypnosis people try to use to program themselves to do things like stop smoking or other is there the potential for personal programming using this hypnagogic state as well just a thought yeah and the the dream i think of this at the dream of this uh would be to do something along the lines of what we see uh from the matrix movie where it's like i don't know how to fly a helicopter download how to fly this helicopter okay what model is it what can you learn what can you learn exactly that whole like putting the textbook under the pillow and osmosis putting the information into your head it's like we're getting closer it's not it's a great idea we spend all this time sleeping why not learn the whole time it'd be fantastic and that sounds like great if you don't know where it came from car broke down oh it's an engine crazy thing i gotta take the mechanic oh wait i actually know how to fix this yeah right if you just like i oh i must say yeah so i had the mechanic show on my head the other night when i was jamming i've got it all in there so i was gonna move on to your stories in the show justin but you've got me concerned with your talking no no no don't because i'm gonna drop okay i'll drop i'll just do one of the two stories you can do too that's fine i know uh so all right this is this is this week in science hey justin you have any stories i have a couple uh the uh there's a disease called i don't know if anybody out there i think blare you're probably too young uh called smallpox uh it was knocked out in 1980 uh officially like there's no more smallpox it's like gone uh but it was thought to have been around since the 17th century this there's a study by an international team of researchers from university Copenhagen university of Cambridge that show that vikings also suffered from smallpox and so the viking age was a lot longer ago than 17th century they uh let's see they had researchers have studied and analyzed dna of just 13 individuals from northern Europe who were infected with smallpox the samples are a thousand years older which puts it back to around year 600 of the previous older samples known to have been infected based on ancient dna and they thus pushed the timeline for smallpox back further in time uh this is quotey voice of evolutionary geneticist who specializes in ancient uh genomes professor eska willerslav global institute university of Copenhagen in person i have likely quotey voiced more than anybody else on this show eska seems to come up a lot uh in my segment uh he says we show that not only was the endem it was endemic in europe but it was actually quite widespread in northern europe already at the year 600 that means the disease was almost certainly far more uh more established and at a much earlier age than previously thought researchers have also discovered that the virus circulating around the viking age those viruses were distinct from their modern counterparts so it's uh they're different enough not the direct ancestral to the viruses that caused the last big outbreak this is all by the way smallpox killed more people more humans than any other virus or bacteria infection or well maybe not infection but uh any other virus uh that ever struck the planet uh eska again they share a common ancestor but they also have unique features that differentiate them from the ones circulating later on in history it turns out that the viruses we have found were some of these very very early and different versions of the devastating pathogens known from the 20th century is the first time we can trace these early smallpox viruses and compare their genomes and mutations to see how the disease evolved over time yeah so that's pretty wild and the so it's uh this is the virus is also called pox virus sometimes called monkey pox because i guess monkeys were uh able to have high loads of this this virus and then spread it there's some written record which this is sort of helping match up to it that there's possible small pox infections uh dating back at least 3 000 years so we haven't found any genetic evidence of this but there's some written record that sounds very much like smallpox um yeah 1980 the world health organization declared it gone so i just looked it up and it looks like around 500 million people died from smallpox so as of today uh covid beat it so that's yep wait no no it has it wow we're not even close no global no just five five million cases oh 500 yeah i missed some uh decimal points yeah yeah no it's fine it's actually much higher actually so we're at so i was thinking 500 000 this is 500 million yeah yeah well and it's actually much higher than the number that i but uh but wow yeah so we've managed to eradicate that one but apparently it took us 3 000 years let's step it up a notch come on people we can do this faster better quicker we have the technology uh now on our side we have science let's let's do this quick yeah but isn't it uh it is interesting though that they found because of the looking at the the viking samples everywhere that they found they found something that was different that it was i mean that genetic yeah so there's been multiple multiple versions of this it could be you know this is a distinct ancestor to the one that hit that in the 20th century but now we can sort of track how these changes and how this virus has been in this pox virus has been in population over time very cool yeah and hopefully knowing that it's popped up before we can prevent it from popping up again yeah well we have we've knocked it out vaccines there's still no cure by the way but we have vaccines uh that prevent people from getting it and we apply those worldwide uh efficiently enough to knock it out i think we did that with uh funding and science not with magic thinking so it's well done people of the and you know this is also something that right that comes up everyone's the older generations probably the greatest generations that have passed and aren't really the vocal present one today dealt with multiple types of i mean we're talking spanish flu polio smallpox they had so many things so many of these that the funding and the importance and and the emphasis on disease control was great and they did such a good job that i think the current generation that hasn't really dealt with a whole lot outside of AIDS um has not come to grips with how important it is to fund things like world health organization to have global monitoring and for that to be funding science to continually uh prepare for the next outbreak uh it's the reason the cdc even exists yep is because of these things so uh we it stinks to have to learn such a painful uh lesson all over again when we had set our country up at one point to be prepared anyway uh there's a research from washington university school of medicine st lewis and the international center for diarrheal disease research looking at malony malnourished children in bangladesh i think this is a bill and melinda gates funded study or at least uh one of them is what's really interesting is they looked at uh they did um they they looked at blood samples from i think it's 80 children who were malnourished and uh showing stunted growth and they identified 14 bacteria that were present in 80 percent of the malnourished stunted children they were highly correlated these bacteria with proteins that cause pro inflammatory state and the stunting the inflammatory markers also could be measured in their blood so they took this these 14 bacterial strains and they put them in mice and then they had a control group and sure enough the mice even though the they were on the same diets those with the 14 bacteria had the stunted growth uh which which i guess uh i guess important about this study is is that aside from malnutrition uh there are other factors that just the nutrients themselves that you're getting aren't the whole story this bacterial invasion seemed to be making it harder for them to uptake nutrients which accelerated that stunting so perhaps a healthy diet provides a diversity of bacteria that out competes these it's kind of unclear you know what the how this result comes about it seems it's obviously linked to the malnutrition but they said you know when they gave it to the mice this these 14 strains uh still had the effect of stunt stunting growth so it could be that a healthy well-fed microbiome could still fend off the the invasion of these bacteria but food alone isn't the only thing you need to combat uh and and people who are malnourished you may also if you're restoring nourishment to somebody who has been malnourished may also need to do a microbiome check to see if these strains are present and if so uh you might have to do an antibiotic treatment and then rebuild as you're yeah so it's just another layer onto the suffering of really poor people in this case children yeah and it makes me it makes me think about uh like the starvation syndrome where when somebody has been malnourished and hasn't had food for a really long time you can try to give food back but sometimes and you have to start with just water and then you go to chicken broth and then you know it's just this slow returning of nutrients to the body and sometimes the body will not accept that at all and will completely shut down um and you'd think i'm feeding the body what you know why isn't it working and maybe it has to do with the bacterial population in the gut that because it's shifted so far to a particular new population dynamic that it's completely blocking nutrients passing through maybe it's blocking it okay so that exactly you're exactly right so this is a senior author Jeffrey i gordon says much of the body's nutrient absorption takes place in the small intestines the small intestines is lined with finger-like projections called billy uh villa which uh increased the absorbive absorptive surface area of the gut and environmental and terric and dysfunction these billy are damaged and collapse causing inflammation in the wall of the gut and reducing the ability to absorb nutrients so you're already starving and now it's getting worse right now you can't even even if you get it hold the food it's not going to have its full effect this disorder has been very difficult to diagnose and it's causes any medic as it is uh as its relationship to many manifestations of malnutrition including short stature and stunting our study was designed to address these questions the results has helped us to decipher disease mechanisms and also provide a rationale for developing their therapies that target the small intestinal microbiome so exactly right key that's the that is the they found the uh some of the mechanics of the uh of that which you're just explaining yeah that's yeah really interesting and i mean right now we are seeing we are seeing so much more malnutrition uh you know there's evidence that because there's food shortages in the pipeline because of COVID-19 and so more there's going to be more malnutrition and under nutrition than we have seen in recent years it's just it's going to grow for a while and um so this is the kind of thing that can potentially help aside from we need to fix the food pipeline but this is this weekend science everybody you're here with us thank you for joining us for this episode if you want to help twist grow get a friend to subscribe today okay but you know you know what time it is right now i think it's what time is it it's time for Blair's Animal Corner with Blair what did you get up there i have thumbs or mosquitoes pick one thumbs oh they're not in the same story thumbs thumbs um so thumbs uh you need thumbs in order to do most things humans do but that by itself is not enough you need dexterity so if you think about when you're a little trying to learn how to use those safety scissors it was not so easy and uh that is the study of this study from department of anthropology at University of Zurich looking at 36 different primate species over a period of more than seven years to try to answer the question of when primates develop their their dexterity and who develops it sooner and more intensely so for humans babies it's around five months before they can grip something and eating with a fork or a knife or tying shoelaces usually takes about five to six years old before they can do that and by comparison by that age other primates are already having offspring of their own so our development is very different from other primates and that includes our dexterity so they found was what they found was that all species learned their respective manual skills in the same order so the timeline might be different but they learned the same kind of progression of dexterity abilities the neural development follows an extremely rigid pattern even in primate species that differ greatly in other respects and something very important in relation to all this was the size of their brain large brain species such as macaques gorillas or chimpanzees were able to solve more complex tasks using their hands and then primates with smaller brains such as lemurs or marmosets and a big brain as far as they can tell equals greater dexterity but where do humans fall in with that because our young humans can barely hold anything they're they try to grab at their foot and miss right so you know species with large brains like humans they think it actually takes us much longer to learn even the simplest hand and finger movements not because we are learning more complex skills but mainly because we don't begin learning them until later basically we're just less well developed at birth so we know that that's not a surprise so we're just starting way further behind from everyone else all the other primates but the progression is the same and our ability to grasp things is actually quite developed compared to other primates and they think that has to do with our big brain only mammals that live a long time have enough time to learn to develop what you can use a large brain for such as complex fine motor skills and that leads to of course the ability to use tools so grabbing things is important manipulating things is even more important and that is a very strict progression that requires a big brain i got my brain so i wonder i i wonder if the same thing the same relationship holds for birds and their beaks so birds that are more dexterous with their beaks and the things that they manipulate and they do in their environment i wonder if their brains are bigger what about elephant trunks do they have the same progression yeah i was gonna say elephants are terrible with their hands i you know although actually i just as i said that uh i think i sent uh i think i said uh maybe both of you this footage i had of an elephant uh manipulating a a ball with its oh i guess it was it with its trunk uh it was outside of its enclosure and it kept like moving it with its trunk to get it out very dexterous like definitely like using it like a hand absolutely got the the uh degrees of freedom in movement for the elephant trunk is it's wild i mean it's it's up there like with we have all these bones that interdigitate and allow us to move in multiple i guess x y z planes right the trunk it has no bones but it is flexible that's all muscle control want to talk about mosquitoes i do so uh mosquitoes us here on twist not not large fans of mosquitoes no no although we have learned the pollinators so you know we have to pollinators got them in you have to give them a little bit of black but in in the the most part pretty frustrated with mosquitoes for just generally killing people and spreading disease not great mosquitoes come on not cool um but it turns out there's about 3,500 mosquito species in the world and only a few actually bite humans so it's important to remember there's lots of mosquitoes out there just get rid of those ones sure yeah but in order to do that you have to know why those three bite humans and the others do not because if you remove those would other mosquitoes simply move into those niches and start biting humans this is the question so in this study they wanted to figure out exactly what kind of cooked up what created a human biting mosquito and so they were able to trap a bunch of mosquitoes from outdoor sites in 27 different locations across sub Saharan Africa because as far as we can tell that's where most mosquitoes come from came from they came from Africa and so back in the lab they tested the preferences of those mosquito populations for the scent of people versus other animals including guinea pigs in coil and then they cross-referenced that with a bunch of different factors about these different types of mosquitoes so first they show that mosquitoes living in dense urban cities were attracted to people more than those from rural or wild places so now you have to ask and I know what you're going to say Justin but is this a chicken egg scenario do we not know that came first right but in this case did the human biting mosquito come first or did the urban area come first right so is the mosquito just reacting to the fact there's lots of humans around or does the mosquito prefer humans and go to where the humans are I see I would I would assume it's just because we don't have fur we're an easy target thin-skinned fleshiness just easier to bite so this is saying that mosquitoes do not inherently go to humans just because they're around the ones that are in urban areas show a kind of preference for humans but this only applied to especially dense modern cities and so likely that's not the original reason that mosquitoes started biting humans the second and probably more important discovery was that mosquitoes living in places with longer and hotter dry seasons showed a strong preference for humans versus animal scent so their immediate habitat didn't have much in effect of an effect but the greater climate of their space did yeah so the regions with dense human populations and the ones that had these dry hot patterns were more likely to bite humans so you're saying the answer is if we got rid of all the local mosquitoes the mosquitoes that moved in went oh look at this long hot dry climate I'm going to bite humans yeah pretty much and that's partially because our blood is full of water but they but they tune in to the human scent they're not tuning in to but they tune into carbon dioxide and other aspects of our scent but the reason that they they love us is because they need water yeah and we are an especially watery animal because we were really good at keeping ourselves hydrated so as opposed to other animals that can go a very long time without water especially ones that live in dry areas they probably don't have as much water to give to the mosquitoes they were bitten but so looking at this information knowing that it has to do with climate and population looking forward how does what we're looking at with climate change and urban growth how is that likely to shape mosquito behavior in the future in a bad way is the answer the rapid rapid urbanization could push more mosquitoes to bite humans and drier hotter climate that is more widespread is more likely to push mosquitoes to bite humans but here's one of the other things they looked at from the study they found that there were genes concentrated in a few key parts of their genome that drove the evolutionary shift in the mosquitoes for their biting preferences so even though we see what shaped this behavior the researchers now have maybe found some genes that could impact that behavior so that could help but based on the external factors that create a biting mosquito quote unquote not looking great well you know if we want to move away from all those hot dry places to the cooler wetter places as water moves around the planet but if everybody does that then it becomes more urban and densely populated that also brings mosquitoes so this is a good reminder that climate change and human health are related which we talk about all the time but since mosquitoes are this massive vector for disease and we know that climate change can impact mosquitoes proclivity to bite humans this is a good reminder that climate change and human health are very closely linked and if we can curb climate change that could help prevent the spread of disease via mosquitoes wondering what a hundred acres of northern arctic canada goes for these days right now there are many mosquitoes there probably but no it's so cold they don't like the cold do they in the spring and summer it warms up a bit everything starts melting it gets very boggish right no there's no escape it's hard to get away from the mosquitoes wherever we run they follow the mosquitoes somebody in the chat room i know we're moving into the question section and i don't want to hijack it but someone asked a really good question which is can mosquitoes pass COVID-19 and i thought that they can't because coronaviruses are so big yeah from what i was aware mosquitoes do not transmit coronavirus yeah this is asked before i think we i think we went to mosquito dot org or something but they might be biased yeah anyway yeah i would i from uh uh yes what does it say i think we did answer this but coronaviruses cannot be transmitted through mosquito bites here we go cdc world health organization answers this question uh there's a study they looked at uh 80s egypti albapictus culex quintifaciatis and they demonstrated that SARS-CoV-2 virus is unable to replicate in the mosquitoes and then therefore cannot be transmitted to people even in the unlikely event that a mosquito fed on a viral mick host there you go west now they can carry that that's awful you know they can carry a virus just not that one just not that one we we lucked out on this one issue yes all right moving into the question segment we do love questions this week ed dire asks what are the best steps that can be taken to get young school aged girls especially in minorities interested in pursuing science as a career also to provide the support they need to do so there's a lot there's a lot yeah um my first my first uh the first thing that jumps to my head is that this is something that people have been working on for a very long time and we are seeing more and more young women in minorities pursuing careers in science and one of the biggest things that has helped is representation representation begets interest definitely yeah so people who who are being they are stepping up as role models and getting into getting getting in front of people I know there's a if then ambassadors program that's working currently they have a hundred or so women from the STEM backgrounds who are being trained to communicate with middle school aged girls and they've been given all sorts of PR training and their the if then campaign is putting them in places where they can have more impact which I think is uh you know there there are people who are putting money in into helping this take root even more deeply in our society but go ahead Claire yeah I just the same thing uh that kind of prevents a lot of people from joining the sciences also prevents people from going into nonprofits um and this is something that we talk a lot about in my work as well and that is anything that is a pay-to-play structure so anything that requires internships which is basically free labor anything where you need to very expensive extra schooling to join these are huge barriers and so there's a whole conversation in my field right now where we're discussing trying to prevent uh prevent us from being the exact same sort of person all the time running these organizations and the programs is to kind of remove those expectations because often if you have uh fields that require internships or other sort of privilege-based um watermarks in order to enter that prevents people from joining who need a paying job or who can't live with their parents forever um so it's so that is a huge huge piece of making sure that we can reach everybody in the sciences and um in a lot of careers that have often been filled with people who have extra money or resources so paid internships uh and maybe zero tuition for you know which is our grants or however you want to facilitate uh besides if America wants to be a leader in the scientific field we need scientists we that's i'm it's not even math uh and we should be reaching out to all of our populations of students to encourage them to be part of it but you're absolutely right i think that uh a program of paid internships which i got one i got one i had a uh basically it was a paid internship summer job in high school at the orthopedic research lab at uc davis under professor mule scharkey and uh that was that like got me interested in science in a way that no class i'd ever taken uh ever could um and it was you know those kinds of experiences that make such a huge difference yeah and i know the university wasn't down for this in general you we need better infrastructure for women in sciences i know we've talked about this on the show before but there's a lot of uh trouble if you want to start a family and you're in academia that you kind of if you're a woman you run the risk of completely losing all tenure all space all research grips so and so that's that's a whole other thing too is that just the structure itself is not necessarily forgiving to biologically what it means to be a woman so one thing i would just add to that is i think you could have inserted any other career choice industry uh with academia uh with that it's it's it's a lot in it's i would say it's more so than other careers because he thinks no he thinks it more so than a law firm more so than being a doctor with residency more so i don't know i i think it's i think it affects everything and i think that there should be but academia it affects especially there is there is an expectation that you do not abandon your lab quote unquote it's very different okay yeah so i'd like and more family support since you yeah and it just means you have to pop out the baby and generally if there is i mean support for any parent support for you know to to create a pipeline and a system that is supportive of parents you know so that it's not something to do with one one sex over the other right that it is that if the husband wants or the you know whoever whichever parent wants to make the choice to stay home if they want to they can or there is time allowed to do that but right now we have a very it's it's it is a patriarchal system it's set up for men to run labs and that's just the way the system has been set up that's who set the system up so if we can ref refurbish the system and switch it around create a pipeline that is supportive to to mothers to fathers to the last the last lab i worked at was run by a woman it was the director of the site was a woman so so it is taking place it's not universal but here's the course i mean but there is different there are different levels of personal drive and other things that lead into this absolutely there's individual issues but there systemic issues that need to need to be changed and i will tell you i will tell you what i think is probably the biggest one and then i'll move on how's it price control and housing decommodate the only way the only way you could have like somebody stay home and and raise the children whether it's the the man which i would love to do or the one is is to have it be of not need two incomes just to pay a mortgage or the rent and that's the thing if you go if you raise the minimum wage rents go up that's a meaningless thing to do mean minimum wage is meaningless without rent control uh housing control decommodate that that's the solution to most of our economic problems as a nation is just the price of housing it's most of the problems right there you're probably right it's one of the big ones yeah so finding a way for science to not be something that is a is a privilege or leisure to join i think is really what this all comes down to yeah yeah i i still i think that's i think that's getting that close i i think that though uh it always does come down to funding though i mean if you if you really do create a wide huge input of money into uh uh scholarships from the federal government or from your state governments for kids to go to secondary school and pursue uh college or you know to get to go for a bachelors at least like if you want to get a bachelor's in in art history you got to pay sorry there's too many people in that field already and we're not using any of maybe a couple good ones but mostly no mostly no that's a personal that's a personal knowledge thing that's nice to have at a dinner sorry art history it's it's study art go make art don't study the history anyway but if you want to do a science we're going to pay for it because we need you in our society we need to craft that future we should be doing that the the the idea that every once in a while we look at like how bad the united states is doing in math and science in our educations is against the rest of the world it gets those countries are paying for it those countries are not saddling them with 200 000 dollars in debt to get a bachelor's degree in science they are investing in their technological future they're investing in their own future because they know all of those brainy people who have the right education will achieve amazing things for them uh it's a failing on our country but it's only one of what's becoming just too many it's just too many we need more more more diverse brains in science that we need we've come to the end of the show everybody thank you for listening thank you ed for your question really appreciate it if people if any of you would like if people if the peoples if you would like to send us a question do you have a question you want us to answer discuss you can send me an email kirsten at thisweekinscience.com you can also leave us a message on our facebook page this weekend science yeah we love the questions keep them coming right now i want to do shout outs to the friends of the show people who help support us and keep us moving fada thank you so much for your help with social media and show notes gourd thank you for manning the chat room identity four thank you for doing the recording every week of the audio and i'd like to thank our patreon sponsors and the boroughs welcome fund for their generous support thank you too eric combs flying out 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another show it's the after show it's the after show it's the after show it's the end of another show it's the after show my camera is crooked again i need to get a little level bubble that i put on top of my camera to make it not crooked I didn't want to poke it down during the show though. We've come to the end of a show. Yeah! Shu-Bru, thanks for joining last week on Science Island. Everyone who joined on Science Island, thank you for joining. Really appreciate that. Oh, the twist theme song is not on SoundCloud anymore. Hmm. I did not put it on SoundCloud, so probably the musician either took it down or... Yeah, I don't know. What? My space? What? I don't understand the MySpace angle. I'm confused. I'm old. I don't get references. I feel like you're the right age for MySpace. I do. I know. Youngins don't know what that is. Oh, I had a MySpace. I so had a MySpace. So did I. I put all sorts of things on MySpace. I had a background on my page. I had a song that played. I was like, Tom's my friend. Yeah. Tom's my friend. He's my friend. He's in MySpace. I am really tired. Oh, you're tired. Yeah, there's a few full brains. Shu-Bru says, brain is full. Oh, yeah. And for those of you... I'll just remind you, Science Island is there for those of you who have the link to hang out. I mean, you could even be there while you're listening to twists talking to each other. But the chat room I like because then I can see it because I'm not going to be able to listen to high fidelity and do the show and be able to keep up with everything. So just stay in the chat room. Don't go over there unless you have private things to talk about. I don't know. But thanks for joining at High Fidelity last week. We'll do another one of those. I'd like to do kind of regular High Fidelity Science Island meetups. Hello, Test Tickle in Alaska. Over on YouTube. That's a lot of daylight. Wait, 18 hours and 20 minutes of daylight, yes? That's a lot. Years ago, people used to take photos at angles to make themselves look better. What do you mean years ago? I didn't know. People do that now. If I were to... I always have the camera up and I'm going to use my better side and have the chin up, you know. I'll be like, wow, you can't go from below. You've got to go from above. Tell them about the angles, Thunderbeaver. Yes. E-world. Oh, Shoebrew, you're going way back. That's nice. Yeah, I heard MySprace is kind of still around. It became more of a music sharing site or something. I thought it was gone. There's a way to figure this out. I won't beat anybody up, but I will not. MySpaceSoCalm is a thing still. It is a thing, yes. It's a thing. But it's not a thing thing like it used to be. It's not like Facebook. Do I still have an account? Wait a minute, is it still in there? Now, everyone, check your MySpace. Are you still on MySpace? Do I have an account? This is not the MySpace that I remember. This is like news, Millie Bobby Brown to start in the new Netflix film, The Girls I've Been. Yeah, I don't know my password. I don't think I'll be able to log in. I don't want to retrieve my password. They wouldn't, would they have would they have MySpace might still be up. Well, that's what I'm wondering. Would they have saved the old accounts or so that they could have more accounts on their list of like, look at how many people we have as members, or would they would they have cleansed their records and started fresh when the new corporate people came in? I wonder, I don't know. Well, so I searched my name and MySpace and I don't see it. Yeah, Tom is not there anymore Fada. There's no Tom. Tom is not a big part of MySpace anymore. Gorov, yes, I do and it's like every other month or so now I do the AAAS Book interview section for their podcast which is fun. So yeah, you will hear my voice on the AAAS podcast occasionally talking to somebody about their book. This month I'm interviewing Carl T. Bergstrom about his book calling Bullshit and we got to say Bullshit a lot because that's the title of his book and it's the subject of his book and yes it was always like and then I had to ask the producers, I was like so for the podcast is it okay to say this word? Is that okay? Like what do I do? So now I have to do an introduction for my section of the podcast that warns people that it's going to have mild profanity. But I was thinking it would be funny to warn people that this section of the podcast is going to be full of fecal excrement from male bovines. Good. I was thinking that would be kind of fun but I don't think they want me to do that. The thing about yes Gary Lubert in the YouTube chat you say or BS right I could say BS but in the book they never use that shortening they never use BS it's always the full word and so yeah I have to count how many times that word is in the book I think that's important. Things like that are very important to me. Yeah. Talking about talking behind one's back what? What were you going to say about BS Justin? Oh was I? You were going to talk about something else. My space maybe? Do you still have a MySpace account? I was also playing along trying to see if I do. The problem is you look up the name Justin Jackson and 10,000 are coming up and so I don't have time to scroll through and find me. But if it's MySpace although I think it was MySpace that I tried to befriend every Justin Jackson that existed out of the 10,000 I got maybe I had a crew of Justin Jackson's at one point that were my friends maybe there's some numbers if I find a Justin Jackson and look at their friends I might still be there. I'm trying and I can't type today. But my computer doesn't want to load. Joe Jackson's Jump and Jive that's a good that's a great album though it's a great album. What's the use of getting sober when you got to get drunk again? I love my whiskey I love my gym every time you see me I'm in my sin. I'm just going to believe that my account is no longer there. Yeah it doesn't look like it. There are so many Justin Jackson's but it's not loading I'm trying to go by oh this is by albums there's a bunch of them. On MySpace is that what you do? I tried to yeah it's still there's too many Justin Jackson's though it's just still loading it'll load forever artists albums yeah it's very music oriented oh yeah I want to go into the people section oh my gosh yeah no results there you go no results from Blair Basterich actually the numbers have gone down though there's only 2229 Justin Jackson's on MySpace there used to be a lot more of us by the way Justin Jackson's are very diverse we are a diverse group of people and a few too many of us are taking a few too many of us are taking that that topless selfie in the mirror we can see the model of the phone just a few too many of those we're not a very sophisticated crew so don't do that don't take pictures of yourself without a shirt in front of a mirror with your phone just don't do it I'm guessing though that that might be a photo that is from before there was like the reversible camera that might be a really old MySpace page because it even looks a little like the picture isn't very crisp they put cameras on both sides of the phone yeah I think it is because the picture is not even very crisp or high resolution we're having yeah I don't think I'm I don't think I exist here that's too bad that's fine yeah that's fine who needs MySpace? well when was MySpace? what year are we talking? I made mine MySpace in 2005 I don't even remember 2005? mine might be horrible to find it might have been like a dating profile like hi I like long walks in the park actually I know Mary who have four children and are very happy together who met on MySpace so many Justin Jacksons founded in 2003 according to identity 4 Justin your audio has been very loud lately oh yeah that's probably true oh look Thunderbeaver's MySpace is hey you got Thunderbeaver on did he ever send us a sample of his music? nope Thunderbeaver he just gave us links to his old bands okay we can check it out now Rod you search for your link in your bookmarks awesome I still I would not have MySpace in my bookmarks anymore because I don't think the chrome browser was a thing back then test tickle I think you are definitely right about that study have a good night Vada wait what was his name? test tickle hahahaha I am 12 years old I am 12 years old but that's hilarious yeah I think you might be a twin it's very possible it's possible thank you for that best laugh I've had all day it's deserved that's good oh my god full of one liners too just scroll up through the chat lots of one liners here let's see has there been any research that proves that censorship of words help people grow into better human beings no there is not yeah going back to that conversation nope Orchid was January 2004 oh wow a while ago I've never heard it this is the first I've heard of it but I was always slow to adapt to stuff like Kiki would be like yeah you need to create a social media account I'm like what's that it's like at the point I think you already had like 10,000 facebook followers and 100,000 twitter followers and I'm like what's a social media account I didn't like understand social medias it's the place where you can go to talk to people I used to get an argument we used to have a chat room on the twist.org website do you remember that one or thisbeconscience.com a forum it wasn't a chat room we had a forum where I get into these wonderful arguments and then I found like there was this other platform and I got really into it for a while and then I just stopped and stopped checking social media mm-hmm you know it's probably a lot better for your mental health and it's you don't waste as much time probably read more books no I think I'm just lazy like I think that's what it is like when I get it I like to like every once in a while something like tests my tickles and I go in there and I have to post something um on the twitter usually uh but then I'm like I'm on whatsapp I like whatsapp but I just use it for talking to friends I don't know why whatsapp didn't I'm not sure why whatsapp didn't become a thing I use vibre oh I think vibre is really good I used to use vibre and whatsapp when I lived abroad but now you can call through whatsapp so I deleted vibre because no vibre you can call but the difference is whatsapp was for messaging and vibre was for calling and so I would message everyone through whatsapp on vibre but now that whatsapp also does calling I deleted vibre so I didn't vibre you can call and you can video call and whats crazy is like vibre works like a facetime kind of a thing even though I can't facetime from when I'm out in the rules when I'm out in the farmlands right I can't facetime because I'm not on wifi and it just won't let me for some reason and I can't I can't do the live stream from the rules the rules internet but I can have like face to face video real timiness on vibre no problem it works with through phone internet or like just phone signal beautifully where like all these other things like fail I don't know why but it works it works yeah science do you have a whole bunch of stories we didn't talk about tonight lithium and drinking water linked with lower suicide rates oh jeez everybody get more lithium wind power off short wind powers paying money back to consumers soon in the UK dry eye disease body odor somebody's story I was just going to say I found a Justin Jackson who did a selfie through the mirror so you can see him holding up the phone who didn't take his shirt off and actually now I'm thinking well we're going to do that picture take your shirt off who are you what are you doing he's not even smiling he's like not smiling but took the picture he's holding up to the mirror but didn't do it topless now I'm even more confused who are you even Justin Jackson there's so many of us there's thousands of us there's thousands of us and some of these are definitely older photos that must be fossilized accounts and some of them are couples and I can't help but wondering are they together is there some weird neither of them has talked about just checked MySpace in so long that they don't realize there's still a couple in MySpace from 20 years ago or I guess it was 17 years ago 16 it's only 234 you know how on Facebook they'll tell you memories and stuff and I'll see pictures of people that I no longer am acquainted with and it's because it's not my photo it's somebody else's photo so I can't get rid of it I can't every year I should be like that guy I would like to find is there an app that will send you all your old tweets that you tweeted on a particular day so it's kind of like a this day in history Facebook there was something that I have that did Facebook, Twitter and Instagram but I want to say maybe it died I don't know I definitely uninstalled it but I don't remember one but yeah I did all three it was pretty cool that would be fun to be like oh look what I said four years ago today what would happen and I was right I think it would be fun for Twitter I don't care about Facebook that much they already bring Facebook surfaces stuff already itself yeah this is good 9.30pm in Alaska you're an hour behind still hmm still catch up come on it's hustle time I like my Adam shirt too thank you very much tiktok I'm not a tiktoker it seems like a lot of work that's part of it I'm like how do I find the time to do the more things and I'm I can't so yeah tiktok to other people even though you know it's a thing but it's everything is a thing and everything takes time and effort to do it right and to do it well pick your poison test tickle wants to know if twist has merch I feel like they ask that just so that they say their name again yes go to twist.org and click on the Zazzle link or go to Zazzle.com and you can see all of our merch yes test tickle you're welcome test tickle really have to feel that underscore yes thunder beaver I'm sorry about body odor researchers had discovered and published a paper this last week about the production of body odor in humans we know it's produced by bacteria and so they figured out these are the bacteria it's odor forming staflacocci that have a bacterial enzyme that cleaves chops thioalcohol precursors chop chop chop it's like ginsu steak knives for proteins and when it chops them up it leads to the production of these thioalcohols that make you stink so what they suggest is by understanding how the bacteria work and how the enzyme works this CT cysteine thiol liase that they could use the form of the molecule the way the structure of the molecule to be able to create anti odor formulations that would specifically act on either that enzyme or the enzyme itself and stop it from acting and so it would be less of a broad spectrum aluminum all over your underarm and more of a this is a very specific thing that's just affecting this one enzyme kind of a treatment right it could be better it could be better some people don't worry about the deodorant anti perspirant always been true I still maintain the more you rely on antiperspirant the worst you will smell because your body produces more because it's like oh no I'm not sweating let me pump out more right more perspiration yeah because I've said this on the show before I stopped wearing deodorant and I have a stinky couple of weeks but then way less way less way less way less like I don't wear it now normally unless I know I'm going to be out in the heat or I do heavy activity but I felt like it took time for my body to readjust and then very little sweat but you do shower you do bathe often I do I shower pretty much every day but but I also think you know like when do we tell people to start wearing it it's like teenagers teenagers which is when yeah it's an overdrive right so like I feel like we could be over correcting at a time when the body's figuring out how much smell to make I think it's probably all always in flux yeah but I could see how when you're going through puberty your body's producing more than it will for the rest of its life definitely but you could also see how your body is like trying to self-regulate and figure out how much this adult microbe spaceship needs and if you're slathering on antiperspirant then that could mess up with the whole process I don't know yeah I don't know I don't know especially because like sweating has to do with hormones and we know also that like for some animals at least putting animals on birth control that messes with your hormones too early can mess with later processes so like there's that whole thing but it does it but sweating is also it's that is a temperature regulation response and it's not just in your armpits but the bacteria like to grow there and in your groin area specifically this particular the staphylococcus bacteria who produce the odor that's where they like to live they're like I will only live in your pits and your groin and that is it and so we sweat all over our body but because it's not in these dark you know enclosed spaces they don't build up and grow as much but yeah but it's controlled locally by cells in the skin also but isn't isn't the smell also by and large controlled by hormones no the smell that's what this is saying the smell is bacteria yeah that's it's not been a known thing like I thought that was already a well known thing it's not hormones no not at all the hormones don't impact what bacteria live there at all probably not so I don't think I had a professor that like was adamant that the reason humans have pubic hair is to catch sweat because there are pheromones in it I remember you've talked about that before but it's it's probably more likely nobody's ever found pheromones before though they've looked at it's probably more likely that the reason that there's pubi hairs is because we spent a lot of time running around on the savanna butt naked and didn't want to sunburn in a couple places some places it's a little more awkward but it has to do with friction that is a theory friction I don't know this one so um anniversaries is like hang on welcome to twist late night so one of the things that you guys are just guessing is body odor and I've always wondered like how come like all animals don't wreak to high health like a human does is it because we interrupt healthy external biome yeah to find wreak because there are some stinky animals um yeah I think is it just because we're sweating but then the thing that the thing I would also point out is that okay this is a little bit sensitive uh this is just between us but have you ever been in close proximity with a very homeless person and then the smell of that proximity could not leave you for a while yeah oh you can you dog like yeah it hits you and it's like it's hard to get so that's not groin or armpit the thing that is the that causes the most emanation of scent from somebody who has not had access to proper bathing for a long time is feet uh this is the this is the view if you asked a homeless person to any article clothing they would like to have replaced it sucks there was a there was a couple of guys who actually they spent a year trying to be homeless and one thing that just was like the the constant wish above anything else was just new socks because feet you've got like a couple of days of feet before it's too much you know maybe three maybe four maybe you can go a week but defeat are the first thing that really so and it kind of makes sense like humans didn't really like wear shoes for that long so it's sort of a new thing to keep them in these warm enclosed things and it's also homeless people are having to walk a lot um but that's that's very much the the part of the body that's putting out and I don't think that's for an aphrodisiatic reasons um but I think it might right that probably is more related to the fact that you're using those feet and they're using them but you're also wearing shoes like I don't I don't believe that that foot stench occurs if you are going barefoot yeah so so there's things that we've done in the garbage and I'm trying what are you doing garbage oh uh but yeah like um but we've also modified how our body and interacts with the environment to the point where yeah feet stink to high hell if you've worn the same pair of socks or shoes for weeks or worn shoes without socks my goodness my children have had the smelliest feet in the world by refusing to wear socks and then it gets this sludge this foot toad jammies sludge in their shoe it's really awful and like their feet really the stinkiest feet in the world because they refuse to wear socks you have to change socks all the time because your feet are constantly eminating this this shedding and this sweating and this but that's in a natural it's in a natural situation we put feet in but nobody's calling that an aphrodisiac and so I'm wanting like the same thing with underarm bio bacteria things if we were running a little bit more free letting the wind go under there I don't think you hear about this uh as much so yeah uh all of our conversations around the biological reason for these things when we've completely altered the environment in which these our bodies exist I don't I think it's hard to just make a quick link backwards I think it's very difficult to extract evolutionary human from 10,000 years ago that long in evolutionary humane and to say that that's why we have this that or the other because we've completely screwed with the system apparently you're like six decibels louder than everybody else Justin that's always true today a man knocked on my door and asked for a small donation towards the local swimming pool I gave him a glass of water trying out your one liners here in our chat hello but they're good ones I haven't heard these ones is it really good uh oh how does it what is that what was that random who's this anniversary band test never mind what anyway this body odor paper I think it's open source open source using the wrong words it's available just body odor available to anyone who walks by on nature apocrine glands echrine glands ok echrine glands are found in high density all over the body they open directly onto the surface of the skin and are essential for thermal regulation in contrast apocrine glands open into hair follicles and typically occur in high density at specific body sites the underarm nipple and external genitalia their exact function and physiological role in modern humans remain poorly understood axillary microbiota plays an important role in the generation of human body odor oh sweaty nipples cutie bacterium and corny bacterium are the dominant genera the cuties and the cornies yes yes, sweaty nipples apparently so axillary malodur is compromised comprised of a mixture of volatile organic compounds with volatile fatty acids and thio alcohols being the primary component the thio alcohols are the most pungent volatiles and so that's the that's what they were looking at they were called okay so now we know the more you know who spent the childhood in front of the television yeah who was a latchkey kid for part of their childhood and watched television that's right alright everyone, is it time to go to bed? it's time for me to go to bed for sure I don't know what everybody's going to do but to end the show is it time? I have an idea say goodnight Blair goodnight Blair, say goodnight Justin goodnight Justin goodnight goodnight everyone I hope you enjoyed another wonderful show really appreciate all of you have a great week, take care of yourselves and we will be back next Wednesday same twist time, same twist channel