 here we are yet again it's science time whoo-hoo are you here with us right now we're gonna talk about science this is this week in science and it's time for our podcast that we do in this here place we're gonna record the show snap snap are we ready I'm ready yeah yes we are live I'm glad I have co-host buy-in this is good yes we're excited Blair is here this is good we're excited just I'm not where I was but I'm still here yes with us I'm excited there we go I heard myself for a second cuz Justin took off his headphones okay let's do this let's do this hello everyone in the chat rooms let's make this a thing it's a real thing in three two this is twist this week in science episode number 810 recorded on Wednesday February 3rd 2021 humans are all thumbs hey everyone I'm Dr. Kiki and tonight we will fill your head with blackmail symbols and monkey talk but first disclaimer disclaimer disclaimer what could be greater than knowing that you're alive a life that great thing that we are all experiencing right now and what would be even better is to do something that you love with the rest of your life since we don't all want to be doctors or science news communicators or succulent farmers you might need to figure out some other things that people can do one great place to look for things to do is science in science there's a lot that needs to be studied in fact everything needs another looking at at some point there's pretty much no limit to what you could decide to study when it comes to science because everything's on the table to get a good idea of what's available what you could study in science we've put together this quick list of examples we call this week in science coming up next I've got the kind of mind I can't get enough I want to learn everything new discoveries that happen every day of the week there's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek I want to science to you Kiki and Blair oh and a good science to you too Justin Blair and everyone out there welcome to another episode of This Week in Science we are here in the beginning of February ready to talk about science doesn't feel like Groundhog's Day to me nope no Surrey Bob we've got new science new stories and new excitement curiosity and fun I have a bunch of stories about thumbs wind and feelings yes what do you have Justin I've got Martian mud pies earliest symbolic writing ever maybe freshwater oceans of the recent past and let me hear your monkey talk let me hear your monkey talk your monkey talk all right I want to hear it I want to hear it later Blair what's in the animal corner I have singing crickets I have black male and I have the moon oh you brought us the moon take a bite out of it oh no you take a bite out of crime oh you you last of them last of them yes bring it down to earth apple unless it's now we're getting into right apple now we're getting into idioms and metaphors and fables and okay back to the science as we jump into the show everyone if you are not yet subscribed to This Week in Science you can find us on youtube facebook on twitch look for This Week in Science you can also find us all places that podcasts are found pretty much I think and you can find us at our website twist.org ready for the science yeah let's do this I've got a fable an old story tom thumb well not really tom thumb I have a story about humans old thumbs turns out the human thumb goes back about two million years according to a new analysis of thumb bones physiology but not just the bones because that's the way that everyone's looked at them before they've looked at that's what you can see that's what right it's exactly soft tissues are not fossilized very easily and so if we're going back in history to look at the leftover bones of our ancestors you're not looking at you know the the fatty or the the not fatty the the bulky strong fleshy the muscles that are involved no no no you're not looking at those you instead are just looking at the bones you're looking at what is there and making inferences based on the proportions that the bones are sitting there in so how long is the bone how short is it how do the joints look like they potentially interdigitate what do we know about living examples of a particular species so say humans or chimpanzees versus what can we kind of make up about these previous ancestors and their bones well these researchers publishing in current biology on the biomechanics of the human thumb and the evolution of dexterity they they based on their new analysis which is a tool that they have come up with that could potentially help analyses of all sorts of different interdigitations and dexterity analyses moving forward they have taken in taken soft tissue into account for the first time they have looked at a very specific muscle in the thumb and it's called the musculus opponents policies and this particular muscle we know it's in humans and let me see i think i justin's holding his thumb up just as an example in case anyone doesn't have one of these at home case you want to know where your thumb muscle is let me i'm going to put a video on the screen for those of you who are here in the room with us right now as justin's holding up his thumb to share so this muscle is if you if you look at your thumb it is from the base of the lowest joint of your thumb down toward the wrist bone and the muscle connects it's the one of the fattier muscles that's right in in the joint and it allows the pulling of the thumb into the rest of the hand so that you can touch your thumb to your fingertips the contraction of that muscle can let you touch your pinky for example with the tip of your thumb and so this is this is one of the muscles that swelled up when i got attacked by the martin up to the like the size of a grapefruit was right here it was probably very sore too and your dexterity was probably reduced as a result i still drop things constantly because of that so this muscle is bigger in human yes it got bigger it got bigger yes it is bigger in humans than it is in chimpanzees and the researchers compared these existing examples so chimpanzees to humans but they also looked at all sorts of other examples of fossilized hominin specimens also looking and comparing against osteo osteopo... osteopithecus? thank you! osteopithecus yes now osteopithecus they have determined did not have as developed a muscle this particular muscle as the hominin other hominin specimens and they have particular fossils from South Africa that they date back to two million years old that they think are the earliest example of the development of this muscle and they believe that the thumb and that muscle are part of what makes humans human yes so so this is fitting the classification that they already had also right this is already they already decided this is when the homo genus started yeah and so this is this is an interesting thing that their classification of these muscles also fits in the same neat category the other thing though is tool tool use because osteopithecus were tool users and creators but the the researchers say that maybe they were just a bit clumsier so yeah i mean this is the the the eventual uh transfer into tool reliant use i've talked about this on the show before yeah that's when they started you start using those hands a lot more and and once you really are carrying these things around you're not going to use your hands for locomotion because you got to carry stuff with them so you got to stay bipedal to carry these things and then if you're holding onto stuff it's hard to climb trees because you really got you made this amazing cool thing you're not going to put it down so you just carry it everywhere you hold on to it even when you sleep probably so yeah our whole evolution was largely based on our our adaptation of stone tools absolutely and it's just it's really interesting that they are pinpointing it to this particular muscle and the evolution of our dexterity and our hands the researchers do criticize that there are probably up there are nine muscles or nine more muscles that are involved in these kinds of dexterous hand movements and so what about all those other muscles just to look at one isn't really enough so that they're recommending that more of these analyses are done on more muscles yeah but I mean they're also not going to if they're at all interested in this field they're not going to say like ah that's it no more studies we've seen enough that's it we're done no more that's it we know everything it's done more but there is also but there's all sorts of stuff that you can look at too and and like the length of the toe bones and the arches and the legs and the bends and the leg like there's all of these things are fitting together yeah and telling the story of human evolution yeah anyway it's a it's a cool story takes us back two million years to the beginning of the homo lineage but let's move on from this into outer space Justin what kind of drama is happening on Mars do I have outer space stories I didn't know that I oh I do yeah um so they've got sinkholes sinkholes and uh watch out where you buy property on Mars yeah sinkholes and landslides uh on the surface of Mars and not a whole lot of great explanation for them I guess there's been some different theories of maybe this was at one time they're thinking oh this was potential evidence for water moving underground but uh this is researchers led by a city institute senior research scientist Janice Bishop came up with a hypothesis about what is causing all of this activity in Mars team believes that thin layers of ice are melting uh from interactions between underground water ice and also chlorine salts and some sulfates which have been creating this strange liquid like slush moving around uh and as it moves in one place the other it's creating sinkholes ground claps and like different things where we can see uh uh landslides or stuff kind of getting upheaved a little bit uh one of the things is they'd noticed this previously that there was went on the sun like these things would appear on sun side of mountains and ridgways and stuff so this is a where does a bishop again I'm excited about the prospect of micro-scaled liquid water on Mars in near surface environments where ice and salts are present this could revolutionize our perspective on have a bit a bit a bit a bit uh just below habitat ability habitat but how to how to have a habit habit habit yeah you can't say that's a hard word habitability habitability just blow the surface on mars we're having trouble with all the words and stuff today um it's not good for people who speak in a podcast yeah so so much words together so some of this some of this comes from previous surveys where they can tell that there's these sulfate conditions and where this is taking place they believe this is where the ice is the ice is involved because it's not till it sort of gets heated up by the Sun that this effect takes place my favorite part of this study is that they re they went and recreated all of these in the lab which is basically a big bucket of dirt that they put ice at the bottom of and froze like really froze because Mars is cold I don't know if you've noticed but it's like get down to negative 60 degrees Celsius frozen so they say yeah so they tried to say what happens if you frozen thawed Mars like soil comprised of chlorine salts and sulfates at low temperatures such as would be found on Mars and they got the result of a slice slushy ice formation near 50 degrees Celsius followed by a gradual melting of the ice once it got to negative 40 degrees Celsius which if you're not familiar with Celsius negative 40 Celsius is exactly the same as negative 40 Fahrenheit so it doesn't matter which which one you have there it's cold it's frozen really cold but they could tell like at that sort of heating up which is about what happens when the Sun hits and it's the open surface of Mars and would warm it up and would warm it up too about that yeah so and they kind of could and then they were seeing these effects and their giant mud pies that they had frozen to these extreme temperatures yeah and they got actually it was a pretty rapid reaction so and also this is I guess there's some correlations to this that happen elsewhere one of the researchers had been working oh where is it somewhere in South America at these the dry valleys the sediments in these dry valleys where they also have these salt conditions and they also have these these sort of strange implosions and underground slushy things that take place from yeah I I know that the that scientists have kind of gone back and forth about that these features on the surface and at a long time ago they were saying oh these are like mudslides and then they were going well how do they get there and then they're like oh these are these are little rivers and streams and and they were thinking that it might be evidence of actual liquid water on the surface and then they're like oh no never mind let's walk back from that again and so now they're coming back with this new evidence that it indeed might be this frozen thawing ground and and the slipping of it I thought before but it was sort of like Mars would get like they thought this frost layer over it overnight when we couldn't see it and then and then the Sun would hit it and it would melt so fast but that would be enough to create the some of these effects yeah but yeah it looks like the ice it's underneath thin layers near the surface that that the mixed with the salt is creating this these strange highways of fluidity underneath the soil very cool fluidly let us move from Mars to the moon Blair very nice like the tides going in out let us discuss the full moon and how it makes people crazy but it doesn't does it doesn't so I brought this mainly because of the very interesting conversation we had last week so if you haven't heard last week's podcast now is the plug to go back and listen Kiki brought a really interesting story about it was it was just it was the smallest sample size perhaps I've ever heard on this show but it was about women's menstrual cycles being affected by the moon which I took a lot of issues with but ultimately it kind of brought this whole conversation about about how humans are impacted by soul by lunar cycles and we do know that there is a weird anecdotal thing if you ask anyone who works in an ER chances are they'll say oh yeah full moons all sorts of wackos end up in the ER on the full moon so what actually is happening there and this is maybe a glimpse at a piece of it so this is from University of Washington the National University of Kilmess in Argentina and Yale University and they were looking at sleep cycles in people and how they oscillate during the twenty nine point five day lunar cycle so they looked at these indigenous communities in northern Argentina with little or no electricity they also looked at college students in Seattle so they kind of took the electricity thing out of the equation they removed that variable by checking all of these things against each other they were consistent and they saw that there are oscillations of an individual's sleep cycle regardless of access to electricity and the variations are less pronounced in urban environments but they're still there this is essentially they sleep less and they go to sleep later closer and closer to the full moon depending on the community the total amount of sleep varied about 46 to 58 minutes about exactly 46 to 58 minutes bedtime seesawed by around 30 minutes and they have the latest bedtimes and the shortest amount of sleep three to five days leading up to the full moon so there there's some stuff going on here most likely it is just like we have our own circadian rhythms inside our body there could be lunar phase rhythms in our body related to the fact that near full moon it is brightest so there you can do stuff at night that you couldn't do in other phases of the lunar cycle so there there are advantages especially if you're a gatherer or if you're a hunter if you're just trying to gather food of any sort there is a certain subset of resources that you could get access to in the dusk and then early evening that you could not get if the moon was not out in a pre-electricity world right not to mention being able to catch all those crepuscular animals exactly yeah last the moon is so loud so noisy it's my ears rang whenever it's a full moon everybody experiences that right yeah so what I want to know is whether the cycle whether that effect shifted when it was cloudy and there was no sign of great question yes that would be an excellent next research question their plans for their next research questions are to focus on how the the moon is impacting their sleep so is that an innate circuit circadian clock are there other signals that are affecting sleep that are related to the full moon so I mean for example there are a lot of animals that are louder on the full moon at night you hear more sounds in general so is there is there some weird thing that's just like the earth is active I need to be active you know it sounds like the light has a lot to do with it I mean that's that would be my primary hypothesis but then I would agree talking about something that lived outdoors but we're talking about humans right and the cave dwelling thing and the difference here between college students in Seattle and people living out in the country in South America you know Argentina that's it's going to be very different living situations and factors the other the other possibility that was brought up in the study last week on menstrual cycles is that there is also potentially an impact of the gravitational effects of the moon mm-hmm which I think would be harder to to prove to prove yes but definitely yeah yeah yeah it's I mean so as opposed to the the situation with the menstrual cycle which is it's about 28 days and a lunar cycles about 29 and a half days so also just maybe that's just it coincidence and over time yeah and over time you will overlap yeah it's gonna happen but but this this is less easily explained away I think and and it's just it's an interesting question of yes we live inside yes we have electricity but that's only been for about 200 years and as we just discussed we've been humans or a hominid of some sort for about two million so that's a lot of history of living with the moon that we could potentially be working with it's very early for us to be ditching those evolutionary habits so and I do know that just anecdotally I have to pull my shades down must pull the shades down when it's a full moon or around it because it's so bright it is disorienting right yeah and even if you're out and about there's you you feel it you're like it's is it nighttime it's too bright out here I know it's making that it's making that sound it's making that sound loud your light I know I can hear the moon I am in this moon moon synesthesia it's just like it's just like a like a really fast ringing bell yeah well that's what it is it calls it it causes the the tinnitus so it kind of sounds like Justin needs to be the focus of a story coming up but in the meantime in the meantime let's talk about wind I got some got some wind for you all wouldn't it be great if wind and solar could make up more of our sustainable energy supply yes it would be great right but shouldn't we know where to put the windmills but Nisha isn't the only spot but they have trees that grow sideways there so expand on that Justin what is the wind like in Benisha it's goes in the same direction all that's because all the trees it comes through that it's strong and it's strong it's consistent and it's extreme and from my sailor family this one dad I learned from you it blows like snot anyway the wind is very extreme and so you need to know the extent of the wind speed how extreme is it going to get in any particular location you have to know how big a windmill you can you can construct you have to know how strong that windmill needs to be you need to have all sorts of engineering factors taken into consideration and if you don't know the wind that you're going to be up against over the lifetime of a windmill you could be overstressing that windmill causing it to break too often it could lead to all sorts of unintended costs and or you're put going to be putting something too big in a location where there's not much wind and you just need a lightweight windmill to get things going so it's really good to have some kind of an atlas where wind speed is specifically mapped to location and publishing in nature energy a bunch of wind energy scientists from Cornell University have released a new global wind atlas it's an atlas it's documents extreme wind speeds for the whole world lots of different locations so that it can't people who want to build windmills and don't know where to put them they can look at the atlas and say hey that's a windy spot maybe we should think about that spot and it will direct people a lot better in their sustainability efforts that's very cool I also love the idea of saying hi nice to meet you what do you do for a living I'm a wind scientist oh my gosh that's amazing oh man don't don't get them started on turbulence though no they will not be quiet again after that so I have this I have this thing stuck in my head forever that there was I think it was a high schooler who won some big prize in a science contest for submitting a design for a windmill that went over freeways so it was one of those ones that shaped kind of like this with the blades and shape horizontally yeah and and and because freeways are consistent wind right it's you know there's the it's always going in the same direction because all the cars speeding by create this this wind it it was this idea it was exactly the same it was a consistent movement of wind at a fairly consistent speed and if cars are going to be producing this turbulence and this movement then why not yeah that's great yeah so according to the paper the total global wind turbine installed capacity is more than 651 gigawatts wind is now generating over 1700 terawatt hours of electricity per year this is only 7.5 percent of global supply in addition the United States it's got how much 7.5 percent of the global Wow that's incredible it is incredible but we can do better we can do more United States our power is carried by 17 percent it's 17 percent wind installed capacity Europe 31 percent China 36 percent yeah the installed capacity for wind energy of the total we're getting there but we need to make more efforts like this to make it better and easier all right Justin tell me about some old symbols discovery by archaeologists from the Hebrew University and the University of Hafea and a team led by the listen to the national dealer research scientific which I believe is in France have uncovered evidence of what may be the earliest known use of symbols this is not like drumming though this is like the although the oldest known symbols are made out of giant rock slabs that can be played they're insane but no this is a those are much those are much more recent maybe 10,000 years I don't know symbols were found cut into bone fragments from the Ramel region in central Israel on their belief to be approximately 120,000 years old oh wow amazing remarkably the fragments remained largely intact and the researchers were able to detect six similar etchings on one side of the bone leaving them to believe that they were in possession of something which held symbolic or spiritual significance the find which is published there was a ordinary international was discovered a trove of flint tools and animal bones exposed to the site of during an archaeological excavation so they think this was a Paleolithic hunter camp meeting place hangout spot where they'd like get together slaughter animals talk about where they'd seen other animals going maybe bone is believed to have come from an extinct wild cattle that was very common in the Middle East at that time but no longer exist so they did some 3d imaging they did some microscopic methods of analysis and they reproduced these engravings in laboratory and they got six different engravings which if you look at it is basically like six almost straight parallel lines to each other sort of looks like primitive doodling but the doctor Iris Gorman Yadav Slavsky of the University Haffey explained based on our laboratory analysis and discovery of microscopic elements we were able to surmise the people of prehistoric times used a sharp tool fashioned from flint rock to make these engravings papers authors stressed that their analysis makes it very clear that engravings were definitely intentionally man-made could not have been made by animal butchering activities they also looked at they were able to determine that this was performed by somebody who was right handed and that it was done in a single working session so this is done all at one time it also looks like they went from right to left I don't know why I think that but that is kind of how it looks and that's also how Hebrew is written right to left that's interesting so I don't know it's a coincidence I'm sure that's a hundred thousand years but it's very it really does look like the it's kind of slanting towards the left but in terms of what it looks like it looks like like somebody was trying to put lines yeah vertical lines however however if you if you take it and you turn it upside down the image that you're seeing it looks then they would be going the other way yeah that's true that's fair I'm not really sure yeah they don't know which well so so that's an interesting point so how do they know it was someone who is right-handed then because you could just turn it upside down yeah they also make the inference that could be symbolic or spiritual which is also a lot of inferencing going on for a couple of parallel lines on a piece of bone yeah it could just be somebody but scratched parallel lines in a piece of bone because they were bored yeah yeah could it just be like them inadvertently like they could be doing yeah we're keeping keeping score of their P-knuckle game I don't know yeah this is Marion Marion pre-vost from the Institute Archaeology at Hebrew University says that every indication was that this was a definite message behind there was a definite message behind what was being carved into the bone we reject any assumption that these grooves were some sort of inadvertent doodling that type of artwork wouldn't have seen this level of attention to detail which is kind of like there's not a lot of detail there but the idea that there was a doodle form of this is what she's almost her assumption is that for this to have been pay-alithic doodling it would have been much simpler simpler than lines I feel like we're sitting here we're picking the support part but also keep in mind that like the somebody gets a toe bone from a dinosaur and is like it looked like this so it's you know it's they're extremely well educated guesses we don't understand the entire depth of research and knowledge and you know I'm also gonna I'm also gonna say though that it could also I mean it's an inflated self of a sense of self-importance and an inflated sense of the research meaning something and I it could be I mean but you are absolutely right the people who wrote this paper know much much more about this than we do so yeah I just thought about there I agree it's like a lot it sounds like a lot from a little thing with some scratches on it but just I've thrown out there there's there's a whole background of research that we're not privy to so it's yeah maybe the other bones and the pile had the the significance of all the bones and other other leftovers that tells a bigger story yeah I can I mean I'll buy that this may be one of the earliest forms of a carving on bone intentionally that we've seen for you to get into symbol to say it's this is symbolic right like this is meaning then we need more context we need I need a call and response I don't I needed not just a deciphering because like uniform looks like nonsense to me to this day but it's the Sumerians had a language and it was mostly like you know who owed who how many bushels of wheat or whatever and it was like day-to-day like they literally had like iPhone size tablets that they were writing on most of the time and these things are discarded like they found tons of this we know it's writing this is carving on a bone what you're doing already when you are yes this is different than butchering the animal but you're already there you might be like hey is this a good knife blade you know what I kind of think this one is yeah this is pretty good look how it cuts into this but like you don't know or you have a job within your tribe of people that's really boring and you're biding your time watching this watching the deer or the sheep you know whatever whatever it was I'm more interested to find out who the people were who were doing the carving than it is really with the yeah anyway yeah I like it that's a good story takes it into a deeper deeper human meaning you know what the biggest human deep thing is is that first sip of coffee in the morning good morning coffee it's amazing and we keep talking about how climate change is going to be threatening a bunch of coffee plants and there are fungal species that are attacking the coffee plants there is one particular fungus called coffee rust which is threatening arabica beans particularly but there are funguses like this that threaten these plants and these plantations and the crop of coffee we must have the coffee so researchers have been trying to figure out ways to address the coffee rust problem and one group found another fungus that seems to have they think potentially an evolutionary relationship with the coffee rust fungus and that they they control each other so the researchers are looking at this fungus in Ethiopia as a potential solution to the coffee leaf rust problem they don't know for sure yet but they are definitely going to investigate it a bit more what they found is that coffee leaf rust generally increases during the rainy to the dry season and then there's this hyper parasite they're calling it the hyper parasite that lives on top of the coffee rust fungus and as the coffee rust fungus gets eaten away the hyper parasite increases from the dry to the rainy season so they kind of balance each other over the seasons and it seems to be a stable relationship in Ethiopia and in plantations in Ethiopia where the arabica beans were very managed they had more problems with coffee rust than unmanaged more naturally fostered crops that allow the hyper parasite to grow and they so the next question is does it have any impact on the actual output of beans from the plants they don't know this yet and so that's what they need to look at but biocontrol is a potential direction for these crops that are we used to have taken out of their native growing environments and moved around the world to different places those parasites the funguses might come with them and spread as well but how do you how do you take up some kind of biocontrol as opposed to bringing pesticides to keep the fungus at bay will it make my coffee taste like mushrooms no the researchers actually say that like they think that this is an evolved relationship between the coffee plant the coffee leaf rust and the hyper parasite that's a very interesting yeah they do better together I wonder since so coffee as a monoculture crop is kind of problematic and there's a movement to do a I forget what it's called but it's when you when you grow multiple crops on one piece of land and they they kind of work with each other just like vanilla needs a little bit of shade coffee actually does well with some shade also so you can you can do different level different height plants in the same plot of land and yeah farm multiple things at once so I would wonder if we were trying to move that way with coffee anyway since the monoculture is so problematic would this fungus relationship potentially mess with that actually and if you tried to grow other crops in that same space would that be a problem I don't know yeah would this fungus interact with other plants that's a that's a big question it does seem to do better so the coffee plants and the hyper fungus like being in the shade of the trees so like you're you're talking about these multi layered plantations that's something that they are thinking is definitely a good direction to go but yeah I mean biocontrol you always have to think about the other things yeah that your biological control could she could effect yeah well because that's the that's my problem I I depend on coffee so much and I love coffee so much stop stop stop stop stop stop this is right okay no this is the problem there would never be a threat to coffee supply you can get the good stuff we really didn't like if you stop telling it if we just stopped coffee drinkers kept telling everybody how great coffee is just pretend it sucks coffee it's like just terrible awful thing kids you don't want if the next generation if the next generation drinks coffee like we drink coffee we're gonna be out of coffee that's just all it's gonna come down to we're just not there's not enough of it wait what if we drink enough coffee we're gonna run everywhere it's a finite resource people it is only so many coffee beans the planet can support and I think we're using all of them right now I know not everyone drinks coffee and good for you if you don't drink coffee that's great that's good because it's terrible stuff you don't get don't get started it's just nasty this is this week in science thank you so much for joining us this evening if you are interested in some item of our merchandise head over to twist org and click on the Zazzle store link you could be like Justin and wear a twist sweatshirt he's got a twist sweatshirt on tonight pretty great cool sweatshirt with some of Blair's art on the back that's right Zazzle store twist org can help support twist all right let's come on back for the fantastic COVID update because we can't sleep because we've got so much anxiety the COVID update I just made that okay accurate accurate true there is some very interesting research highlighted by the CDC this week which I just really enjoyed one particular study out of that is published in science advances this week that the CDC highlighted which is titled air flows inside passion passenger cars and implications for airborne disease transmission so if you like to hop in an Uber or a lift and ride share with other people this study is for you looking at air flowing cars they found that when driving at 50 miles an hour having the front right and the rear left windows open so across the car this isn't in a single cab truck this is a vehicle with front seats back seats the front right window open back left rear left window open driver sitting in the front right passenger in front driver in the front left passenger in the rear right the airflow was pulled in through the rear window and circulated around the car in such a way as to create what they called an air curtain that protected would protect the passenger from any germs that the driver might have yeah because it's coming in the front passenger seat and exiting the rear window right but that's it not so much the way that the airflow actually works is because of the way that the air gets sucked into the car most of the air is entering through the rear window circulating around and then getting pulled back from the front window past the driver to the back to the rear window again it's a very interesting airflow pattern that I actually did not expect so the the dynamics of it are really interesting yeah they did not test this at lower speeds they didn't test it with you know more make-believe passengers who could could be infected they didn't they didn't test it with a whole bunch of variables but if you're a single passenger in your rideshare vehicle or if you're gonna go pick somebody up know that you can help increase your safety with a very simple opposite kind of kitty corner open windows and seating wow situation yeah interesting very interesting stuff and also in the this particular highlight from the CDC were a couple of studies that imply children under 20 years of age are less likely to show symptoms be symptomatic with SARS-CoV-2 infection and are also highly likely to spread the SARS-CoV-2 virus more likely than had before been expected and as we are talking about trying to get kids back to school and with these more highly contagious variants on the rise maybe this is information that school districts and governors of states should be taking into account so get those teachers vaccinated please get the teachers vaccinated and get the grandparents vaccinated and just let's not put the kids back and don't do the six weeks thing we've already talked about that I jumped in here it wasn't even that's what I was gonna say okay but this is this is more proof that we need to reverse the order of the vaccines give it to this young if you want to open schools then vaccinate the children if you want the college kids back on campus vaccinate them first but no because we don't the thing is we don't so right now we are working from the the knowledge that it the vaccine protects the person who's vaccinated but we don't know whether vaccinated people can still spread infection still not know that they didn't test that when they were testing the efficacy of the vaccine because they were trying to get it out so that was something that they did not so now they're trying to collect data on that currently while they're vaccinating people yeah because it was more important to get it passed so that people who are constantly actually exposed could be protected yeah I guess what I'm getting as this is this is not a study that can be done in the United States I absolutely agree because we have no test spread also we have we have uncontrolled spread and we have no testing we have no but in scenarios of places that still are able to test and contact trace that's what that that needs to get figured out there because it's ridiculous that we don't know it and yet there's millions it makes it just makes it it makes the whole situation more complicated but we are currently vaccinating more people each day than are being infected globally this is great news okay there is also that I have one I have a couple of little brief bad news stories for you and then I've got good news okay I want to end the COVID update on on good news but first let's talk about these new variants there are a bunch of them circulating increasing numbers because hey they're more easily transmissible they love grabbing onto that ace to receptor nice and strong helps them get access to the scalp cells more easily so fewer viral particles are necessary for an infection anyway a preprint in bio archives suggests that the mRNA vaccines in use are still effective against these these mutants these are new mutations that are making the transmissibility more effective but they're also starting to evade our defenses a little bit and so even though these mRNA vaccines are still effective there is a reduction in their effectiveness when they've been tested in laboratory situations sometimes up to a tenfold reduction in their effectiveness which would mean that we definitely need as many people vaccinated as possible as quickly as possible well I think they even said at one point that between even like six some people said 60 and some people said 80% efficacy would still be effect be effective at reopening the country if everybody got it 90 so yes so higher is better but I remember there were people saying like if the vaccine is 60% effective push it anyway yeah absolutely and they and they are percent which is another aspect of the Johnson and Johnson vaccine the Oxford AstraZeneca they are going that is less effective after the first shot but and it is in the 60% to 70% effectiveness range but it seems to become more effective over time that the body's immune response improves after within the weeks after having gotten the vaccine and so they're thinking that this is the that the single shot with a lower effectiveness it's still effective but it's it's going to help reduce transmission which that's what we want anyway in the treatment side of things we have been using some of these monoclonal antibody treatments which are basically antibodies that go in and neutralize the spike protein and make it unable to attach to ourselves to gain entry another study looked at a particular mutation that's the N439 K mutation found that the monoclonal antibody treatments are less effective against the variants that have this change so not only are these variants starting to evade our defenses but they're also starting to evade these antibodies and this particular kind of treatment so the monoclonal antibodies that's the remdesivir the treatment that people with money are getting not everybody's been able to get so we'll see how long that remains viable as a treatment and a good treatment good news good news there have been questions about whether people who are pregnant should get vaccinated the decision was made to allow pregnant women pregnant people to get vaccinated and there is now evidence from a study out in JAMA that not from vaccines but from covid infections that there is evidence of antibodies immunoglobulins produced as a result of the infection during the mother's bodies fighting the virus that they're finding those immunoglobulins in the cord blood the fact that they're in the cord blood in the placenta means that these antibodies are very likely to be getting to the fetus and so if they're getting to the fetus that means that the mother is passing the immunity along to the baby which is great yes so other vaccines they've seen very similar effects and so they believe that vaccines of pregnant women could confer immunity to the babies so that's good news very good news and finally let's get happy some happy treatment there is a study out this week suggesting that a an antidepressant an SSRI called flu flu voxamine might help treat COVID-19 we've reported on this before and there have been a couple of studies previously but this new one was a trial that took place in California at the the Oakland race it's at the Berkeley racetrack the Berkeley racetrack in the San Francisco Bay area and it is most of the employees are Hispanic right around Thanksgiving when there was a huge spike in infections they had a big outbreak of COVID-19 there was a doctor who had had applied for money from a private fund that is funding projects to see if drugs that have already been authorized for use for different uses by the FDA could also be used to treat COVID-19 got some of that money randomized the groups like half of the about 60% of the people had COVID and wanted to get this treatment 40% didn't what they found there were no hospitalizations in the group that got the two week course of the SSRI and in the placebo group there were multiple hop hospitalizations and two ventilations and I believe one a death one or two deaths that were correlated so it's not a randomized control trial but it is another piece of evidence suggesting that this SSRI which also acts on a very specific receptor a sigma receptor to reduce the body's immune response could be helpful for treatments moving forward so it's not at the point of hey everybody this is what you need right now but doctors are starting to go oh well if I have a really really like a patient who's really on the ropes and looking bad maybe this is something that we could try so it's starting to hit that point happy news more treatments possibly research is moving along we are getting there there's hope life could get back to normal by 2022 perhaps okay this COVID update unless there is something really really big that happens over the next couple of weeks we're going what I'm going to try is a new a new strategy for the show where we will do a COVID update at the beginning of the month and we'll we'll alternate weeks we got COVID we got COVID fatigue I think everybody trying to make my twist prediction come true right away right away I'm also going to try and split it up with interviews so that we have at least two interviews a month and we have a reduced number of COVID updates but really try and give you good news like the give you the news when we do the COVID update just so you know this is this weekend science hey you know what time it is what time is it I think it's time for Blair's Animal Corner with Blair and I have a story about singing crickets and how traffic noise could be messing their mating strategy up so this is from Anglia Ruskin University and look it's looking at the meeting behavior of crickets famously known for singing and it looks like their meeting behavior is affected by traffic noise and other man-made sounds this of course has implications on other animals and crickets worldwide but so they were studying the mating choices of female field crickets that's grueless bimaculatus under different acoustic conditions they paired female crickets with silenced male crickets was that a cricket um they paired them with silenced male crickets that's important so that they could then play cricket sounds to control for the individual so they had these silenced male crickets and then they would pipe in ambient noise artificial white noise and traffic noise so they had these kind of different levels of competing sounds with cricket song and then they would play cricket songs of varying quality this is important because the females are already choosing males based on the quality of their song so they have to make sure that they're not crossing their wires here that they're playing that a cricket has a bad song and there's traffic noise that could be confounding variables right so instead they're all silent they're playing different quality of cricket song as far as female crickets are concerned and then they have these different noises in the background so in control conditions of ambient noise females mounted the males much sooner and more frequently when they had a high quality courtship song so normal wild sounds so low not really intrusive and then oh that's a good mating song great i'm ready okay however high quality songs had no benefit versus low quality songs in white noise or traffic noise conditions so the females are not doing a good job of picking out the good cricket songs when there are these other sounds happening in the background of the white noise or traffic noise so they were not influenced by the presence of song at all there's there's a little cricket is that a high quality cricket song or a low quality cricket song you decide i don't know i have no idea yeah so the bottom line here is that man made noise this white noise or traffic noise which by the way they got the traffic noise by actually putting these containers of crickets next to a freeway i thought was great ambient ambient noise the freeway yes uh so uh the man made noise does alter how females perceive males when making mate choice decisions so there's a couple ways that this could impact the future generations of crickets and other animals who have sexual signals that are auditory around man made sounds so the first would be that actually the researcher said i didn't even think about it is that the male crickets might actually try to expend even more energy to make even better songs because they're not getting an edge on other crickets but what i see here is the likelihood that there would be a reduction or loss of good quality cricket sounds in general everyone would just become kind of lousy at at singing but there's also an expectation that the quality of the cricket song is somehow linked to fitness so the other problem here the really big problem is not just like oh man we might not hear crickets anymore it might actually lead to a reduction in offspring viability because a good song is supposed to be linked to fitness so if you are not selecting for a good song you are no longer selecting for fitness that could have huge problems on the fitness of crickets so i mean the long and short of this is like hey humans make a lot of unnatural sounds it's messing with animals that talk to each other we knew that already we've done stories about bird song and all this kind of stuff but it's interesting to hear it about invertebrates also and to kind of see this very specific delineation where even white noise just just unnatural white noise was also causing problems not just traffic sounds just anything that is increasing the volume of the environment and making it harder to for other sounds to propagate i mean white noise is great at blocking other noise so i mean so many people have white noise generators or pink noise generators for to help them sleep because what is pink noise it's different frequencies but oh i don't even know about that yeah and the only reason that people use those things is because they can't sleep with all the sounds of those crickets outside just gods so many crickets how are the crickets out at your bus so uh they're there but not that strong so what's really interesting is there has been a massive drop-off in crickets and i think in yolo county yeah because as i remember as a child it was a symphony of crickets every night and it doesn't exist anymore i can't hear i haven't heard that anywhere even out in the country it's you don't get that i wonder if that's because there are less amphibians because it's the whole like wolves and yellowstone park thing right there were also yeah there were also lots of amphibians and there are fewer of those yeah yeah i don't know it's it's an interesting question where all the crickets going and this also might be part of it maybe they just can't find each other or that they're mating with inferior males well okay so i did i did remember whatever males are here this is uh sort of anecdotal but i it may be that those were both unnatural phenomenon here when they recreated the the wetlands we got all of these cranes and herons and all like this huge assortment of waterfowl bird uh that now show up to the area um and it was about that same time when amphibians disappeared so so it could be the wetlands eating the amphibians i don't know who got the crickets that was probably poison that people yeah well it's very but also the wetlands were for sure put there for the amphibians so that's that's an interesting thing no no no they were put there for the birds these ones these are this is a bird sanctuary where they they flood but they only flood it uh for them to to like the ducks and the stuff when they're migrating a lot of the rest of the year the the water's not there i think it's called the rainy season yeah but it doesn't rain enough to do that what they do is they pull it off of they pull it off of the the sacramental river the american river and they push it over to yeah and then the rest of the year it's rice fields yes that's huh yeah anyway all right well anyway crickets crickets and uh moving on from from fitness of crickets to fitness of some other animals uh this is a very this is an extremely preliminary um just kind of a look at uh animals and specific strategies for getting help from relatives in raising their young this is a some biologists from University of Bristol have a new argument that they want to explore that some animals might use blackmail to coerce relatives into assisting with the rearing of young so yes so in the historical way that we've looked at family members helping with the raising of young this is the Darwinian hypothesis that family members help because they're shared genes and so they help because the cost benefit analysis shows this is also called um Hamilton's rule actually this isn't Darwin um it they will help if it leads to a net increase in copies of your genes in a population so if um if i help my brother raise his kids then my genes will benefit because there are some of my genes in those kids so is the cost benefit analysis beneficial to me but this new exploration is looking at manipulation wherein an individual can threaten to harm their own survival or their own reproductive success if relatives withhold help oh it's emotional blackmail now it makes sense now it's it is i'm so mad at you i'm gonna hold my breath and it's your fault that i'm doing it that yeah that emotional blackmail sounds like human families so an example that they saw in the wild is that um a mother wasp may lay a large clutch and all but exhaust her energy reserves laying so many eggs so unless a relative steps in to help the babies may not uh survive neither may the mother so it's kind of like oh whoopsy yes you'll have to help me now you have no choice um yeah this is how social species begin yeah so it's about putting shared genes in jeopardy they they also like to think about this in terms of a doomsday device so if you think about how a doomsday device works in kind of modern culture it's a mechanism that will trigger a disastrous nuclear strike if a rival makes an unwelcome move right so this is this is part of what the cold war was about was like you might nuke us but i'm gonna nuke you then and then we're all going to be nuked so it's like if animals can tie uh their own survival or reproductive success to a partner's behavior then the threat of self-sabotage becomes credible so this preliminary paper looked at whether black male between kin is theoretically possible and they did a bunch of mathematical science they looked at it and it is viable under the right conditions it can it can evolve and be selected for in these social species so under this illusion of harmonious cooperation among relatives some animals might have been given no choice so hopefully we'll get more on that in in the coming years i would say i'd love to see a paper actually detailing this in a specific species or looking at some of the pro con kind of data that we might have about how well this works but it is a very interesting look at something where we'd love to think about animals it's like oh yeah they love to help each other like that's why we have grandmas right is is so that they can help with the fitness of their genes that are in their grandchildren and it's just a big happy family and maybe they were blackmailed into it and grandma really wanted to go have her own life they were like okay you can do that but but i think that's isn't that the same i mean then that's the same motivation though it's yeah you have to help because you want your genes to prosper and continue even though you that's why how you're getting emotionally black well it's you know it's like the it's like the the adult child that lives in the basement well like you really like them to go live on their own but you're not going to put them out on the street right so it's i think yeah i think you're right it's the same net result as you're trying to protect your genes yeah but it's just the reasoning behind it is different the urgency the motivation absolutely the motivation i think well so no the motivation is different because it's it's a threat versus a just a want to help with with a general success i think it's the same it's just both times it's not it's not because if you think about like true altruism is you're trying to and that's separate from this this is not altruistic behavior because you're benefiting because your genes are benefiting but if you think about altruism it's different from symbiosis because one is you're helping another being and you're getting nothing in return and another one is you're helping another being because you're getting something in return so there are different motivations for different strategies in the animal kingdom and those small differences matter okay i still don't believe in that that definition of altruism but that's that's i think there is still a selfish motivation behind that which is being part of being part of a herd or community which is that that's your duty that's the expected that you're going to be helpful and compliant to others when they need it because that's what you get also out of being part of that so are you returning the wallet you found on the street in the hopes that someone else would do the same for you or you're turning that wallet that you found on the street because you want $50 as a reward that is the difference don't see it oh well okay that's no i think it's the same then everybody's always doing it because they're gonna get their wallet back or it's going back to their community that's the reciprocity yes so there's there's differences there there's a difference in an expectation of mutual response and respect and a reward those are different things i disagree i think both of them have that same reward i think that they do i think they both they absolutely do have a selfish motivation behind both of them i never said it wasn't selfish i said the reward was different and the motivation was different yes it's different yeah so there's an interesting article about this right now in nature in the people are quick we just had a conversation somebody's already done a paper on it yeah there's a there's a paper out now on the evolution of altruism and the serial rediscovery of the role of relatedness like seriously this conversation right now um and they talk about Hamilton's rule in the 1960s the evolutionary biologist W.D. Hamilton came up with a solution to the problem of altruism so how did it evolve and could it have evolved without relatedness being a part of it um but anyway there's a whole paper on it i haven't read it but uh from what i can tell from skimming it concludes that um relatedness is pretty much it that's what starts altruism out there is a role for relatedness for altruism to evolve the genes you got to be in it for your genes at some point but the motivation makes a big difference what is that motivation yeah oh have you seen the the the whales i i've put in i put a note because you were talking about the the the crickets earlier Blair the whales yes there are whales there's a paper out currently oh yes about whales in Patagonia and how they are avoiding traffic and there was a and a a gift that was shared on social media last night that had that showed this poor whale with a tracker on it that was tracked and all of the traffic paths of ships within a particular bay and the um the the terrible efforts that it seemed to be making to avoid the traffic to to go after the plankton that it was trying to feed on anyway there is a paper out right now and there is uh i think you can find an article about this also in the guardian right now yeah no humans mess everything up humans we're messing it all up this is this weekend science we are here again to talk with you about all the science things that we loved this week thank you for listening if you are listening and enjoying the show maybe consider supporting the show we do take donations through our through paypal and also through the patreon platform you can click on the patreon link at twist.org head over to patreon and choose your level of support those over 10 per month get thanked by name at the end of the show your name could be read in the list help us make that list longer we can't do this without your support we thank you for your support all righty justin do you have some news for us uh yeah i don't know particular order i got in but this is uh anthropologist from the University of Zurich they want to know what monkeys were thinking about when other monkeys were talking so they shot them in the face wait what with non-invasive thermal imaging guns able to measure temperature changes in the faces of the marmoset monkeys to quantify subtle emotional responses that they were having so monkeys uh experience an increase in emotional arousal they will then show a drop in facial surface temperature especially on the nose because it's not covered by furry stuff uh says first author Rahel Brugger PhD candidate department of anthropology university of Zurich we were able to use this technique to show that the marmosets did not perceive the vocal interactions between conspecifics as the mere sum of the single call elements but rather perceive them holistically as a conversation so basically two monkeys are talking instead of just that monkey reacting to each single call separately was reacting to the conversation that was taking place between these other monkeys for their study this researchers use playbacks uh vocal exchanges between marmosets as well as calls of individual animals who were not involved in an interaction they played the corresponding playbacks from a hidden loud speaker use the thermo thermography to measure the monkeys reactions to the various simulations this showed that the responses to the individual uh to the call interactions was significantly different than the responses of just individual calls so they could tell the difference between a conversation and monkey monologues in the simulations the researchers additionally distinguished between cooperative and competitive interactions after the monkeys had heard different interactions they were then given an opportunity to go closer to the sounds that they were hearing from the the separate uh speakers that they had playing back and forth the researchers observed the marmosets preferred to approach the simulated uh monkey sounds in the conversation who had been involved in a cooperative interaction with the third party that preference actually fits the social system and natural behavior of these small brazilian new world monkeys who are cooperative breeders and depend on the cooperatives cooperativeness of others in their group this is uh judith burkhart also anthropologist this study adds the growing evidence that many animals are not only passive observers of third party interactions but that they also interpret them in addition our study shows that thermography can help unveil how these social interactions are perceived in non-verbal subjects i feel like if you couldn't read the room read the treetops as a social animal that would be that would be that would be a big mistake that would that would mean death a lot of the time i feel it yeah and especially with animals that are social in nature you want to be able to understand what your con specifics are talking about or okay are you just shouting at the sky or are you talking about a predator or have you found a food source um they're a cute little marmoset that you got your eye on i don't know what are you talking about and you also want to be able to as we've talked about in the animal corner so many times um be able to read the other animals in the local environment what are they doing what signals are they giving off so this is yeah and but i like the thermography as a way of being able to read the emotional state so how excited or interested based on blood flow that's kind of a that's a very interesting perspective yeah it's a it's a nice way of being able to monitor the monkey without having drilled holes into the skull or right what are you paying attention to monkey yeah i'm invasive you get a little bit better natural feel for behavior that way yeah yeah it's a yeah it's a neat setup although i mean externally i guess we people who study marmosets probably have a good idea of what physical behaviors mean whether certain facial like putting your face in a particular way is aggressive or not aggressive or excited or not aggressive you know holding your body in a particular way what that means yeah yeah if you can if you can use ai to interpret the position of horses ears to figure out how they're feeling about a situation yes i feel like you could definitely do the same with monkey faces it would be very cool to do both together is the is some sort of ai looking at monkey faces the expressions that they're making coupled with the like that yeah the heat distribution in their face yeah and and why this is also important is that even though the researchers might be able to look at the little monkey and say oh i can tell how the monkey is doing right now or with the monkey that's not science you can't you can't translate that into a paper you can't say well how do you know the horse is hungry well i could just tell by looking at the horse that's how i do it yeah then you're just a horse whisper you're not doing same right you need to be able to get a measure you need a measure that doesn't have human observation as its soul yeah that's a great point yep yeah and and there's definitely the the indescribable thing i mean when i was a zookeeper all the time i mean all the time there were times where i would i would go to the the zoo bats would be like so and so there's something wrong with them yeah and they would say well well why do you think that i just know i think there's something weird i don't know and you know eventually we were able to figure out they were eating less this was happening that was happening they would get taken in they it would to the vet and they'd figure out what's going on but there was this weird kind of aura of there's something weird there so yes there's something that that um you're making observations that you haven't translated into specifics and you and it's still triggering the proper response yeah i mean i i did an emotional intelligence training for my job earlier today and they did a quiz where they showed people's faces and you had to say what expression it meant which actually sounds a lot easier than it is for the average person i mean some of them are really easy but some of them are harder and um and they actually pointed out what about that person's face indicates that they're happy or sad or shy or embarrassed or in pain so they pick out these little things and that's exactly it there's stuff going on that you notice that you can't quantify and you just go that person's mad i know that yeah yeah fascinating you got another study got another story justin uh sure uh this is the uh uh freshwater oceans of the not so distant past uh the arctic ocean the one up in the top there was covered by 0.9 kilometers of ice at one point or uh 900 meters if you're not familiar kilometers was entirely filled underneath with uh freshwater uh twice in the last 150,000 years this uh this was reported in the latest issue of journal nature result of a long-time or long-term research uh by scientist alfred wergner at the institute of marum and uh so basically what they've done is a detailed analysis of composition of marine deposits that uh could demonstrate that the arctic ocean as well as the nordic seas that below norway and sweden and north of germany and denmark did not contain sea salt in that water and at least two glacial age uh glacial periods in the last 150,000 years it kind of seems to me it makes sense once you picture the glacier there that it's only freshwater that's going into these areas that have are evacuated or these lower elevation places where seas are currently uh but it's really weird to think of that much freshwater in those places uh detailed analysis illustrates this the water then also was occasionally released into the north atlantic in very short time periods with sort of you'd end up with this fresh water underground lake or a freshwater at ground level uh lake but the but not a kilometer of ice on top of it could then shoot out in really short periods into the north atlantic thereby cooling the north atlantic messing up the atlantic conveyor belt and they think has been responsible for a couple of the rapid climate oscillations that they've seen in those regions that they didn't really have any good explanation for so uh about 60 to 70,000 years ago a particularly cold part of the last glacial period large parts of northern europe north america were covered by ice sheets european ice sheet uh spanned a distance of more than 5,000 kilometers from ireland and scotland via scandinavia to the eastern rim of the car of sea which i don't really know where that is it's somewhat arctic ocean uh north america large parts of what uh is now known as canada i don't know if i'm reading it right we're buried under two large ice sheets greenland and parts of the bering sea coastline were also glaciated it was just a big ol iceberg up up top but yeah there was there was two different periods though once about 70 to 60,000 years ago 130 to 150,000 years ago both periods fresh water accumulated under the ice so much that it can created a completely fresh water arctic ocean for thousands and thousands of years is it really it's a is it just a big arctic lake at that point yeah frozen lake like a kidney bean looks like yes that's what the model makes it look like in this image yeah huh yeah how fascinating that it would get penned in on so many sides by the underwater topography and also by the ice and become and push out all the salt to the point that you have that fresh water that's that's pretty cool it does also make you kind of rethink what we assume we know about the climate of the past and how something like this can totally switch up climactic events and the reasoning behind them and right yeah and then on top of that it can make you kind of think about okay at what point in time did this happen what animals were evolving and so if we're talking about you know different fossils being found in the sediments you know why are you finding fresh water fossils in this area as opposed to saltwater fossils and you know yeah yeah great differences it's pretty cool very cool you want to hear about brains always yes i have a story about a brain well about brains and then i have a story about feelings because feelings are important too and people want to know about feelings so researchers have been trying to figure out where in our brain the neurons are that make us stop so when you're walking and you realize you're going to accidentally step on something and you have to stop your step action what are the neurons that stop your already planned action what if you're in the middle of saying something you realize you really shouldn't say that thing to stop or you're driving and there's suddenly a red light and you have to stop and then as you're sitting there at the red light you're like thinking about going and so your foot just comes off the brake pedal a little bit and then you're like oh no no stop there's neurons in our brain that are responsible for stopping actions not just starting them so starting in every the stop it's not the start of a stop it is actually a stop and so there are neurons that are involved in switching your mode from go to stop this almost sounds like the underpinnings the basis the foundation the baseline for free will maybe a little bit i don't know yeah i mean if we if you think about it in a very at a very deep level yeah but there are neurons and these researchers from cedar cyanide they took patients who were have parkinsons who were going in to get a an implant put into their brain so they're undergoing open brain surgery and during the surgery the researchers stuck electrodes into a part of the brain called the subthalamic nucleus now this is an area in the basal brain so this is not higher consciousness processing this is this is basal level stuff this is physical reactivity reflex level stuff almost and when they were making these people who have their have their brains undergoing brain surgery had them watch a signal and wait for it to put the stop signal on and then they tested different neurons in the area of the brain to see if there were neurons that changed their behavior when the stop signal was supposed to start and indeed they found single neurons that are responsible that increase their activity when a behavior that has been started like i'm going to go push this elevator button no i don't want to before you stop that action of pushing the elevator button there are single neurons in the subthalamic nuclei that are telling you to stop changing the behavior it's so okay it's not a it's not a switch it's a brake and a gas pedal yes exactly yeah and so these are these are the brake neurons and then it gives your brain it stops the it stops the signals and then it gives your brain a second to start whatever the new action is whatever the next go action is so so can we knock it out and see what happened right well that that's their question which is there are like in Parkinson's there are diseases of brain related movement disorders and the question is whether or not these neurons are involved in these movement disorders and whether we can control them to control movement disorders so there's there's some really interesting questions as to where this research is going to go with respect to therapeutics whether or not there's going to be the ability to stop impulsive action so in the sense of your free will for for disorders where there are twitches that are impulses that you can't control is there something that can are can these neurons be recruited to control those those disorders we will see how cool that people undergoing brain surgery are like yeah go ahead do some science read around in there well well while my head's open just stick some wires in there let's see yeah I mean I would I would too but I feel like that's so rad I just have to take a second and everybody who participates in studies in medical studies thank you such a cool thing to do yeah yeah it's very very cool agreed all right now thinking of maybe I don't know if this is a cool thing to do or not we're Justin you were talking about the thermal imaging of the marmoset faces to determine their emotional state well researchers just published in the public library of science one plus one a study in which they're using a deep learning frame framework to determine people's emotional state using wireless radio signals get your tin foil hats everybody yeah yeah so you know if you we have thermal imaging right that can detect blood flow changes we also can detect things like changes in heart rate changes in breathing that may indicate changes in emotional state these researchers are using radio signals bouncing them off of people to be able to measure heart rate and other other physiological factors that are markers of emotion and in this yeah it's it's okay it can be good for monitoring people potentially in the study they used these wireless signals they were tracking ECG recordings on people as they were watching movies various videos see how the people reacted and then tried to measure those ECG signals distantly using using radio radio waves and they were successful in being able to do this so that would be really helpful in the age of masks because I can tell what people are doing with their pink under the mask are you do you hate me are you happy what's happening oh this this readout says you're frustrated with me why is that is it because I'm pointing radio waves at you yeah so their their system was able to learn to identify fairly uh some emotions discussed joy relaxation fear scariness from radio frequency and ECG data and potentially I mean I don't know is this going to be tracking people in shops yes as you're shopping tracking people in movie theaters in airports probably these these technologies are probably going to be used to track us for multiple different reasons I like to think that you know that this is the kind of thing that will come in handy um I don't know at a speed dating perhaps I don't know so so I guess I guess part of the thing is like with the algorithms uh for for uh searches on the on the internet whether you're googling stuff or you're looking at say watching videos or you're liking things in your facebook thing or whatever the algorithm starts feeding you things that it thinks that you would like also right that you would also consume right uh being able to read somebody's emotional state and knowing the their their likes or their buying patterns on the amazon or what have you you can hit them with a comfort product ad or something like this right away like all of these things are possible there is also possible that there's a a good life out there that we could all be living a good arcs of emotional states and relaxation and things to get us a little bit more energized in sort of longer wavelengths than we are getting from our social media that could potentially actually be applied to all of the technology that we have to make a more fulfilling life however could you imagine a smart home that responds to you so it the smart home that knows to dim the lights and put on calming music calming music it gives you something to energize you right yeah but instead you're right you're likely gonna be walking past a vending machine that's gonna radio scan you and be like hey buddy you want some sugar you look a little that like whatever that's how my that's that's how my vending machine sounds everybody's vending machine will have a tone voice specifically geared to them when they walk by but mine's like mine's like a carney from new jersey hey buddy hey come over here a sec let me talk a little minute sounds like your vending machine used to smell cigarettes no they did when i was a kid that's how you got them yeah the research team says they do plan on working with healthcare professionals and social sciences on on let me say on public acceptance and ethical concerns around the use of this technology oh not on on ethical applications though yeah what are your concerns we just want to know how to diffuse your concerns and then everything will be fine yeah what is the actual practical use of this well i think there are many practical uses and we've named several but i mean but those are like capitalistic practical uses like what's the like for the betterment of society medical right so so if you have if your house if your devices if your house is in tune with you and with it and through deep learning has also learned your patterns so if your house determines that you are stressed out anxious at a time when you don't really need to be maybe your house can release calming essential oils in dim the lights or maybe if you like you know are yawning at a time when you need to be energized and getting things done maybe your house will automatically make you a cup of coffee i i mean there are many different ways that a smart home like a truly smart home could respond to you and your needs before you even know you have them you know what i just thought of too is uh if there was something like this in classrooms it can recognize when everyone was starting to fall asleep and not pay attention be like all right now it's recess time go outside there was a teacher stop stop teachers stop the kids need to go play yeah they're not listening anymore a movie from like i don't know when 1980 ish called uh mass appeal anyway it had to do with um the people who are giving sermons preachers priests or something uh being able to tell to be able to rate it based on the number of coughs that they heard in the in the in the congregation the number of coughs that they heard funny would would determine whether or not they needed to uh alter it or speed it up or make it a little bit more engaging because the coughs were the way people suddenly disengage but i was thinking of it less is like i like the smart house idea that's a little like next level okay google uh but i i'm more talking about like having therapists been having psychologists been working long enough in the field to have figured out the good arc the healthy arc for human psychology and can't we just be fed that that healthy human arc the the smell of dirt and trees whatever it is whatever it is you know it's like hey uh you need to go on a dating app but this is not speed dating this is we're really gonna take a good look at who these people are and have some conversations over a long period of time to then realize that uh it's that person that you meet offline who's gonna just like knock you out of it you just didn't see coming but still like there's gotta be a right way of doing things other than everything always being let's market let's get them to click let's get them to engage and then who cares what the result is because that right doesn't sound like a healthy future okay one one quick problem i see here is that this might uh remove the ability to feign interest or be polite so i just think this is fake yeah yes this is an opportunity to like prevent people from being able to lie with their face which sometimes is a good thing and sometimes would be terrible wait you think it would work like a lie detector is it i mean it could no i see that i see that except lie detectors don't work there are people who train themselves to lie to it yeah you could train yourself for situations you know get yourself ready for performances in particular situations um i wonder though if this could uh could replace wearables for you know so maybe you're working out you're working out at the gym or you're working out even in your basement or whatever and instead of having a heart rate monitor on your wrist your your your house just tells you your heart rate is 156 beats per minute you haven't gotten up in three hours go walk around go walk around i don't want to you yeah please get up maybe there i don't feel like it it's time to get up then what does it do then it's like don't make me i'm like i've taken all the chairs that's when your bed take the chairs i don't even oh i can't sit down now okay i see it nicely done and that's when your bed just picks you up and throws you out and on that note oh my goodness we've come to the end of our show we have and i'm not tracking anyone here except maybe trying to keep track of our chat room i do love our chat room if you watch live you can always join the chat room say hi if you do i'm glad you're back justin thanks for coming back safely i'm glad also that we have made it through the official groundhog day for 2021 even though every day may seem like groundhog day special it was the special day six more weeks of winter everyone everywhere we're so lucky yeah all right should we talk should we talk happy happy end of show things okay we've done it we made it to the end of the 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philosophy we're just trying to save the world from death so everybody listen to everything we say and if you use our method instead of the toxoplasm this week in science this week in science this week in science this week in science this week in science this week in science the laundry list of items i want to address from stopping global hunger to dredging Loch Ness i'm trying to promote more rational thought and i'll try to answer any question you've got so how can i ever see the changes i seek when i can only set up shop one hour week in science is coming your way to what we say and this week in science this week in science this week in science this week in science this week in science this week in science and we have reached the after show you back there Blair so StreamYard is gonna have things like video clips and other things available to play with which i'm very excited they're going to start making templates and other things for broadcasts which might be very useful video elements because i'm not good at designing video elements but other people are and if they know what sizes to make things oh Sadie how did Sadie handle the move where is Sadie she doesn't know we moved she's with my parents oh she's still there yeah it's having a great time they have a giant backyard and my dad's been taking her to the beach every day she's never gonna want to come home oh don't say that no we're gonna get her soon um we're just trying to make sure that like furniture is where it's gonna be and there's space for her we need to get a few more boxes on box before there's actually space for a dog and she can't accidentally eat something that will kill her hey that's good yeah so it's you know it would have been okay if we didn't have it but since my parents are more than happy to spend time with her and she loves being there it's it's easy yeah yeah so they're having a ball oh good yes but soon yes hopefully she'll be able to hang out on this couch during twist behind me oh my gosh i'm just this is her couch hold on she's gonna sit back there but she's just gonna be the cutest little thing in the back hopefully and then we're gonna be like we're just gonna talk about Sadie the show is now this weekend Sadie still twist you know it's still twist it's just this weekend Sadie yeah so she'll she'll come over and be like what this is all my stuff but this isn't my house this is not my beautiful life yeah oh Stella has a dog name i mean Pamela gay has a dog named Stella i have a cat named Stella Stella hello black lagoon 2019 well we are in our podcast black lagoon 2019 is looking for new peeps to add to a podcast that sounds fun what kind of podcast hmm got people over on twitch hello twitch how's it going over there sounds like uh yeah i'm gonna sit it's the after show i'm gonna sit it is you can but now we're just looking at the top of your head don't worry where'd you go hold on hold on watch just a second it's gonna be like what is happening an elevator table yeah what the hunting drone episode oh i need to get my drone license or drone license i have a i have a i have a i have a mavic and i want the end the fc yes the uh faa requires a license i've heard that it is possibly because of the company itself being in china but i'm not exactly sure what the legal reasons are but yeah anyway i need to get a i need to get a permit to fly my drone around but it's a cool drone and i can't wait to fly it and then we could have an outdoor episode of twist with the drone doing live drone footage that would be an interesting tie-in twist i guess it could be especially if we did something like a camping trip out to john day fossil beds and oh can we could we like after this whole yeah outdoor i know how we can get there talking to scientists i like it please i want this that would be fun yes oh kev b you're right a smart house would have kept blare in frame automatically she wouldn't have had to hit that button i still just want i still just want a second webcam i want a reaction cam i want a cam that i can look off to the side like doing the show and then hit the thing switch the camera like or is that really what i think right i'd say i'm messing up my second shot here like i want that you could have that is that a thing is that possible now yes but you would probably want to have software outside of stream yard that can go into stream yard as your camera and then from the other software you could control which camera input it would be all right so anyway yeah it's like it would be too hard yeah it's too hard still just second webcam you would think would be that just the classic two shot is all i'm asking for it shouldn't be too much if you had two computers you could log in from two computers each one with a different webcam and then i and then we could have the the two the two shot that's that's possible that's not quite the anything is possible we could make it happen with enough money jesson says he's that's right yes you lissy's you're right timid tenor somebody noticed your hair cut justin uh yeah no i had to go very nice haircut six thousand miles to get it yeah but i got it so it's a denmark haircut yes nice i have a danish hair stylist uh who has actually only ever cut my hair uh like but i have to travel to them they don't do house calls and it's like that was my whole trip uh yes i think i know who this person is do i know how i met this person i think you might have met this hair stylist this hairstylist slash scientist slash right before i believe some the world shut down the world shut down right after we met this hairstylist yes well done yeah actually it's a great haircut like not bad for somebody who had never ever cut hair before and was just faced with uh somebody who hadn't had a haircut in many months it was like okay okay i'll try very brave yeah yeah brian went six months and now he's almost a six month six months again it's pretty time you just gotta figure it out go watch a couple of youtube videos and uh get some clippers i don't think you let me do that yeah we've talked about it yeah you actually you both have to be brave together i mean i do it i've done it i've cut other people's hair before but but are you talking about like women's hair or long and you're just like we'll just take a little off or are you talking about i use clippers on a guy before okay but um not a long time i i would want to watch a youtube video first yeah no good for me i i i i i i try to cut hair occasionally it goes okay i haven't done any lasting damage it's good i just can't show you the back because that's gaurav hasn't you haven't cut your hair this entire pandemic that's gotta be some hair you have a ponytail no marshal hasn't he's gotten hair cuts but he's growing his hair out i told him i liked kurt russell as santa claus and so he took that as he took that as a goal he's facial hair he does not at all but he's he's trying to grow the hair out we'll see how that goes and i do know i have oh gaurav can make a ponytail now nice yeah i have other friends who are growing their hair as well can do the ponytail pandemic ponytails i we started watching last night again because it's very appropriate and uh yeah it's very interesting to watch wil forte's hair grow do they do that in the in the show just let it let it grow oh that's good yeah and he is a beard that like goes straight out on the sides oh my gosh yeah love it yeah it's i mean it makes sense if you really were the last man on earth why would you shave i would still want to shave i don't think i it i it has nothing to do with other people yeah but what about like after two years of being alone if i could still get a uh usable shaver or a working shaver yeah i would do it absolutely that's the one thing i would this this i would not get a haircut probably this would be down to my arse but uh i'd still be clean shave don't i don't like the just doesn't the feel of it it's just so what are your uh super bowl party plans there's the super bowls happening party what's a party are they are they really do are they going through with it yeah yeah they're having a super bowl yes there's going to be a game there have been games they've got a they've got a i think they've got bubbles for the various teams they've the nfl's transmission is pretty bad isn't it yes yeah they keep people people keep having to not be in going on quarantine and all sorts of stuff yeah you know it has ended up that with their like second string kicker being quarterback they ran out of players or something that's just because that very pretty was hurt that it was a settlement was covered um yeah there's two of them i think two of them one was an injury but i think two of the backups were covered i think you're right and there was there was also a talk about they were they were like trying to see if they could get like the quarterback coach to go in but the nfl told them no because they didn't want teams stacking their coaching staff with uh actual players to try to get around the whole like cash limits on how many or limits on how many players you could have on the team and all this stuff um but yeah i think i think it's a great testament to professional sports that they've managed to uh to keep themselves separate from society for this year to say yeah they they say they've had a league positivity rate of from testing of 0.08 percent which is pretty good can i also point something out they've been testing yes everyone everyone with great regularity um yeah that's kind of a good model we should maybe as a greater nation look towards again uh this is this is like this is that argument that i lost immediately after floating it that professional athletes should be in that early tier of people who get vaccinated but they they do provide us they're like the what nasa does for all sorts of different technologies by doing the moonshot and whatever professional athletes do for medicine they really do they really what's really what's interesting here though so eric in alaska is saying a lot of the advertisers are dropping out of the super bowl this year so there are a few fun ads and i think that's going to yeah because there's not going to be is the ability to make good ads is that no there's gonna be eyes on it nobody's has leaving the house so budweiser what a few brands are doing like they that have multiple sub brands underneath them they're taking their main brand and that money that's spent on ads out so budweiser is taking all of the money they would have spent on a super bowl budweiser kicking a football or right that kind of stuff exactly they're they're they're taking that money and they are funding covid messaging so they're going to they're going to put the money towards ads that support people wearing masks and social distancing and so public health messages and there are other brands that are doing the same thing but even though budweiser is skipping the super bowl their sub brands so like bud light and and other brands that are within their their tent are are still going to be making super bowl ads so there will be yeah so there will be ads it's yeah we just might not have the same players that you normally see the normal big name brands i think coca-cola might be out and doing something else hmm yeah there were or it's pepsi or something there was like a few and one doritos and maybe i don't know i i read an article about it but it was really interesting that there was there was this push to take the ad money and donate it to the ad council and covid messaging which is amazing yeah yeah so i'm okay with not having as fun of ads for the super bowl but because i think the ad council needs that money let's get the message out people oh the puppy bowl that would be good is that still going on i mean one would assume you know it seems like a pretty covid safe activity wait was that is that the is that a no no it's not jimmy kimmel it's the other it's it's animal planet does the puppy bowl is it animal oh yes and so it's all animals it's all puppies that are actually up for adoption and uh yeah and so they all go and they just play around on a little yes there will be a puppy bowl there will be sunday february 7th at 2 p.m eastern time ahead of the super bowl oh they're not going concurrent this year no it's going to be ahead of the super bowl which is the buccaneers versus the chiefs kicking off at 3 30 pacific jg says uh they're good on covid but not so good on traumatic brain injury yeah well well actually no but we like as a society as a scientific if you're going to research concussions or traumatic brain injury this this is a place you can pull tremendous data and research from this is again this is one of those weird things where i don't know that i i feel like we talked about this like so many times that it seems like uh you know it's old news but every kind of sports injury happens to people in their day-to-day lives at some point uh acl tears things like this knee tears these you tear the small muscle around your knee that keeps the knee cap in place these sorts of things used to be like okay we'll give you a cane that's it you now walk with a limp forever try not to use your leg or put weight on it but but because you had like somebody who over the years you had thousands of athletes who had great potential for their teams and had money invested in them already and got the best possible treatment but also they spent money on research to see how they could fix injuries like this if you tear your your meniscus or your acl or something like this it's not a big deal now they know exactly what to do they know exactly how to and you will be walking around just fine but the difference is that if you tear a ligament in your leg your personality doesn't change and you don't become suicidal it's this is like a very different those are two very different points and i understand whoa whoa what are you talking about traumatic injuries no no no yeah yeah yeah so i think that's a pretty big jump to go from it isn't because i'm not i'm not making a some moralistic issue about the thing what i'm saying is the other side is if we're also learning what we learn about knee tears when it comes to traumatic brain injury and how to heal the brain and how to get that then we're also like this is again this is you're putting people into traumatic situations for completely different reasons but we're learning tremendous amounts on how we can treat even brain injuries right the sports medicine for for these professional sports yeah the professional sports are leading to better understanding and and how to treat things because these are the first the like like veterans um they're they're the front they're in the front lines for needing treatment yeah except veterans typically don't have as much money behind each veteran or good enough lobbying or union or whatever you want to call it behind getting them back into society they really don't a lot of the times like veteran hospitals are rather underfunded compared to any kind of other health care you can imagine um but they will but you are getting these professional athletes who many of whom are millionaires if not multimillionaires when they go to seek treatment for something they can call up the best experts the best researchers and they can get funding behind that research through the union to take care of those one thing if i can just throw out there as a as a devil's advocate thing here is that that is true for the people who are professional athletes but there is a pipeline of people who are trying to become professional athletes athletes who get terrible injuries and never make it to be professionals and don't get the same medical care so the pipeline is part of the problem here no it's so so what i'm talking about is something no i know i will say more words i'll say more words i'll say what i think i think that what we're talking about is slightly different um when i'm talking about them getting the best treatment and therefore because they're rich they'll be fine isn't what i mean what i mean is because of the wealth that it pioneered these treatments and it pioneered this research and so now that kid who was playing uh uh the high school football who gets a knee injury now doesn't walk with a limp for the rest of their life talking about oh yeah the limp came from a high school football game back in 86 when no no now they got it the surgeon knew how to fix it they knew how to do the the physical therapy afterwards and now that kid walks like you never or now that adult or that old man can walk like he never had a knee injury that's what i mean i don't i i'm not trying to say that hopefully and hopefully that money i take it back to take it back to the traumatic brain injury hopefully that money will spearhead a lot of treatments for not just football players but people who are in car accidents and exactly you know who are massively impacted by impacts to their to their heads to their brains i mean and largely it's it's largely i think the players union like they have research that they invest in the separate from the NFL but they get the NFL to kick into into all of these things and and yeah you wait if you get into a car accident you get a traumatic head injury who's gonna pay for a two million dollar project into seeing or a three million dollars worth of investment into seeing how to keep that from from affecting the rest of your life you would think maybe the insurance companies would do it you think maybe the government would nobody's doing it yeah so so there's an urgency that's created by the union and the relationship with the money that's involved that does so yes you're right there's the fact that i think that's it's the most horrendous thing about that pipeline that you're talking about is the kid from the high school made it through injury free through high school he got a four-year college scholarship to go play football and he's gonna get a college education and he's gonna become a science communicator because it's really what he wants to do more than football but on that first year he gets a leg injury and won't be able to play for maybe at least another year and he gets kicked off the team and loses the scholarship so he can't go to the college anymore that i think you need a guaranteed scholarship i don't think it should be play dependent or injury dependent because that part is horrendously wrong and unfair you're playing and putting your health up on the line as that's the thing that you're collateral your collateral is your future health so yeah give them an education give it why not yes but they throw those kids out of college which is no they do it's it's i think the most vile american educational system the university system included there needs to be overhaul we're seeing a lot of that stuff starting to change and the pandemic is pushing a lot of change at the moment we'll see we'll see what kind of upheaval there is i don't know hopefully we'll get university at least college level education for everyone because i mean it basically is what a high school education used to be right used to be oh you got a high school diploma great you can get a job now it's like what you don't have a college diploma what yeah well and uh it makes it hard at that point when it was optional was like 125 a semester and now it's pretty much required and the cheapest schools are thousands of dollars a semester yeah you're in debt forever and everybody feels like they have to do it so they put themselves into debt and then they're the predatory colleges the whole system but you know what there is playing at the same time as the puppy bowl what the kitten bowl they usually do a halftime show with kitchens they're going to do at 2 p.m eastern time yeah the kitten bowl on the homework channel welcome to being woke there they're not just the entertainment at halftime they're athletes too okay um yeah that's interesting but you know i think there's like this bias this puppy bias there is obviously so much more money in the puppy bowl like what is this this is like men's football and women's football we're gonna fund the puppies but we're not gonna fund the kittens i mean come on this is ridiculous they all need to be adopted truth oh my god sony mentioned robin the robin hood fiasca that the uh game stop that was my favorite story that was i woke up i woke up one morning and everybody was talking about game stop and i was like okay why what is going on i did a deep dive and i was like what is happening here yeah suddenly a lot of people learned about stonks he didn't know about stonks yeah it's yikes i think it's very funny that uh when you when you beat somebody at their own game you're cheating it's very like it's very school like schoolyard logic like oh that's only allowed when i do it yeah no because the group of people on a reddit sub channel got this idea started that's some sort of like collusiony thing but when we go on one of the eight or all of the eight uh financial channels on the cable news networks and say yeah i think we're gonna we're gonna short this one because we don't like the future of it and everybody else should sell it that's that's fine it's fine oh and and oh sure that hedge fund they can totally over short the stock sure sure and by the way don't mess with nerd stocks don't mess don't short nerd stocks don't you do not short the game stops the nerds will get you the nerds will come and take see this is the power of the internet too is like pre-internet this never the internet has allowed this to happen like oh absolutely yeah because even if you had a way to get in touch with people about this thing enough time would have passed that games game stop would have already been dead by the time this all got figured out because you have this way to just be like this is what's happening this is what we're gonna do let's do it right now and you could have this back and forth and make a plan and boom it was yeah it was definitely like oh the internet has given us uh the ability to peek kind of behind the veil of certain things in our society in a way that we haven't before yeah and i yeah and and not just peek behind the veil i think shine light on the dark corners where certain certain groups of people have been taking advantage of the financial system for years and taking and transferring money to the wealthy for years you know it's very interesting an example of this about two years ago uh with ge uh general electric uh there was a very public uh saying that there's just ge is in trouble they're gonna go bankrupt blah blah blah blah and it went out through those financial channels the tank the stock tanked turned out that person was linked to a group that was shorting uh making the bet that they would fail so like this has been that game going on for a long time yeah with all of the loud speaker in the media but it's not insider trading but these guys had no media they weren't they were just like we're gonna buy it we're gonna it's shorted we'll buy it that's it yeah go people go smart people go nerd people go people who are i don't know still angry that banks weren't punished for the for the recession well and that stocks are doing so well during a pandemic when our economy is like doing terribly and this is exactly why it's it's why and it's it's because our economy is not the stock market yeah it's not no this trickle down thing it's not working none of the evidence suggests it's working now i i do i bet you this is great now let me tell you let me tell you uh i do believe uh the many billions of dollars lost by the hedge funds to these game stop investors will eventually eventually nice trickle down to them will eventually trickle because they're all out of work and they're broke and they're not gonna get jobs again because they just they they basically face planted with a multi-billion dollar uh treasury behind them but but eventually those nerds will spend the money and a little trickle down to you just just wait it takes some time but just wait the money will come back in the direction of that company and someday maybe sure sure well she's thunder beaver says this country practices evaporate up economics it does yes i was gonna say trickle up but i like the evaporate up or water cycle going yes uh seriously the stock market is it's like gambling it's it's legal gambling and that's why the editors are getting in trouble now is because they call it gambling so they're like oh no stock brokers and hedge funds they're not gambling though they're like it's their job so that's allowed when they do that but because you read it as you're gambling but what if my job was as a bookie right no right it's a good job i've read uh Cory Doctorow had this really interesting thread um kind of going through the history of the stock market and 401ks and um how people how how people got duped into um setting their their savings the retirement up for gambling and kind of paying into this system when it didn't start out this way this is something that happened during the 80s and it's uh 70s and 80s but it's it was a fast and fascinating thread um of how financial pressures kind of twisted things to where they are today and yeah it's uh it's weird we are in a sticky little wicket that's for sure yeah it's for sure i heard you say something Justin is it that time is it is that what you were gonna say is it time to say good night it's time to say good night Blair is it time to say good night Justin it's time to say good night Justin is it time to say good night good night it is good night everyone we will see you again next week we do hope that you have a wonderful week don't go to any Super Bowl parties please just stay home with your multiple screens and watch the puppy bowl the kitten bowl the stonk market and the Super Bowl on all the screens or don't and just watch old episodes of this week in science on youtube i mean yeah that's what you could do science everyone it's science we'll see you next week thank you for spending time with us we hope that you stay well