 This is TWIS, this week in Science episode number 578, recorded on Wednesday, August 3rd, 2016. The ultimate answer! Hey everyone, I am Dr. Kiki and tonight we are going to fill your heads with an Olympic virus, dancing sea lions and neuronal line dancing. But first... Disclaimer! Disclaimer! Disclaimer! There is possibility and then there is probability. It is possible to win the lottery, but if you buy the ticket you will most probably lose. It is possible to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge and survive. But a large majority of those that launch themselves off probably end up, most probably end up as lunch for all manner of fishy feasters. It is possible to be struck by lightning while hitting a hole in one in the seventh at Pebble Beach. But your golf buddy probably just said he saw it go in because that's what buddies do while riding in ambulances with friends who have just been struck by lightning. It is possible that the government is secretly working with an alien race of dinosaurs to first enslave and later eat all of mankind in order to take over the planet. Which would explain global warming and chemtrails and why the show Firefly was cancelled and why there is always somebody whenever you are out in public who seems to be watching you, following you. How else would they know that you alone have figured it all out? Why they even know that your name is Ed? Run, Ed! Run for the hills! They're onto you! But unless your name is Ed, this is most probably not true. And while everything and anything may seem possible, the improbable more often than not is improbable because it is not possible. What is always possible and becoming increasingly probable, unless your name is Ed, and I mean it, Ed, you've got to go now, is that you are about to enjoy another episode of This Week in Science, coming up next. I want to know what's happening, what's happening, what's happening this week in science. What's happening, what's happening, what's happening this week in science. Science to you, Kiki and Blair. And good science to you, Justin, Blair and everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of This Week in Science. We're back yet again to talk science to you, to talk science with each other and hopefully with you. And I hope that you enjoy the show that we have lined up for you because we have all sorts of stories. Because last week we didn't get to all of our stories, so I know we've got some stories left over from last week. We've also got new stories from this week, which was a good week as well, so time to science it up. Let's see what we can do. Alright, I have stories about the parasitic Achilles heel, your neurons, and Jupiter's moon. Justin, what do you have? I've got colorful dinosaurs. Like little plastic ones? No, no, no, no. Really real life colorful dinosaurs. A new kind of laser that will blow your mind. And I'm bringing back the story from last week on Oily Palms. Oily Palms. I'm just not even going to, we'll just wait and see what that's about. Okay, Blair, what's in the animal corner? Oh, let's see, I have talking animals, I have dancing animals, I have hybrid animals, and I have my symbiotic threesome from last week. One, two, three, can't have symbiosis without me. No, maybe not. You're so close. We shall see. We'll have to wait till the very end to find out about that one. Oh my goodness. So, let's get into some stories. I've got a bunch of fun stories ahead. To start though, it's all about the parasites, because you know what? The Olympics are coming up, and they're taking place in Rio. Their water is questionable. Their water is questionable. There are mosquitoes there who are vectors for parasites like malaria. And also for viruses. So I'm kind of parasite-virus-ed up for the start of the show. But it's not all bad news. It's actually pretty good to start with. This week, research in the Public Library of Science Pathogens and Cell Microbiology from a group of researchers, of which we're from the Center CNRS in France and then University of Melbourne. So we've got some very interesting work here. Malaria and Toxoplasmosis. We love Toxo. One of our favorite subjects here. We don't like malaria so much, but we enjoy talking about Toxoplasmosis. It's kind of fun and interesting from a human psychology or human behavior perspective. But both of them are part of a group of parasites that's called apicomplexa. And for years, about the last 15 years, researchers have been kind of finding out all this interesting stuff about them that the apicomplexa group that was not known before. And one of the things that they've recently discovered or that they discovered was that these parasites have a compartment in them called the apicoplast. And apicoplasts are from algae and plants. So all of a sudden, these parasites have something in common with plants as opposed to potentially animals that they have evolved with years and years and years to infect and live off of. These parasites, this is exciting. This discovery that they have this apicoplast in common with plants means that this is a potential doorway for us to get into finding treatments that possibly have fewer side effects or no side effects compared to treatments that would have been based off of the biological characteristics that they have in common with animals, i.e. humans. Because when you go in for a mechanism and if that mechanism is something that a person has also, then it's going to trigger or break that mechanism in the human cells as well, causing all sorts of side effects. We don't want that to happen when you're talking about a treatment. And so if you're talking about something that a plant has, but not a person, and you're going, oh, we want to make a treatment, suddenly you have something to act upon. So they have discovered these apicoplasts in the malaria and also toxoplasma are important. They generate a precursor that's necessary for the synthesis of most of the parasite's lipid membranes. So when the parasites are reproducing, they need to make up new membranes as they reproduce, right? Because they're splitting or budding or reproducing themselves, right? So they have to be able to produce lipid membranes. If you could break that, they wouldn't be able to reproduce. And suddenly you have a treatment. Yeah. Nice. Tricky, very tricky. So this is a potential new path for malaria treatment and toxoplasma treatment. Yeah. So fascinating. I love that it's like malaria, toxoplasma together. And then last week, the Australian National University researchers have also discovered a kind of interesting similar finding related to malaria and the anti-malarials that are used to treat malaria. And what they discovered is that one particular drug, chloroquine, there's a protein that's an ion channel, and it moves things from one place to another. But when resistance to chloroquine gets started, what happens is it makes, even though the parasite is resistant to chloroquine as an anti-malarial, it becomes hypersensitive to other anti-malarials. And so the researchers were like, why is this going on? And they basically discovered that the mutations that happen in that transporter protein are specific to chloroquine, but basically all of a sudden they help the other anti-malarials move to places where they need to go to have effects. So it's like, I'm going to get resistant to this one thing, and then it's like because of that it makes it actually more sensitive and easily treated by another. Nice. Wow. Two very tricky treatments against malaria. Yeah. And so one of the researchers in this particular study says, essentially the parasite can't have its cake and eat it too. So if chloroquine or a related drug is paired with a drug that's super active against the modified protein, no matter what the parasite tries to do, it's checkmate for malaria. And they're thinking that if this research could be used by health authorities, it could potentially be used to use different drug regimes in tandem or one after another to kind of extend the lifespan of these anti-malarials, which malaria is becoming rapidly resistant to. And if, yeah, and once we get to the point where mosquitoes are no longer a vector of these harmful diseases, then yeah, I consider having one as a pet. Then the interesting question is, all right, which mosquitoes are worse for which? We know that Aedes aegyptes is a pretty bad one for dengue and Zika virus. Right now it's like high dengue season in Brazil where the Olympics are taking place that have already begun really. The soccer teams are in soccer teams are already competing against each other. Friday is when the whole summer games get started. So we'll see how everything moves on that front. But where we stand on the Zika virus and treatment right now is that the NIH is beginning its stage two DNA vaccine study for Zika virus, which basically they're going to take like healthy 18 to 35 year olds and give them this DNA vaccine just to see whether or not they get sick. Not sick from the virus, but whether the virus, whether the vaccine hurts them and makes them have an effect that is not what we want. So this is a proof of concept and also a safety test for the vaccine. It's like one of the first kind of trials you have to do. But who knows if they'll be able to finish it or even move forward into phase three trials with larger groups of people because the Obama administration has reported that funds for Zika virus research are running out. And so if the funds run out, Congress doesn't allocate more money for NIH and these kinds of studies, then it's going to delay the research and vaccine production process. So we'll see what happens there. Especially since Zika has now been reported in over 40 US military members, of course these people have been located all over the world. Some in the United States, but others all over. At least one pregnant military member and also the dependence of military members. So we have some children who have come down with it because of where people are located. And additionally, there's been an outbreak in Florida. Yeah, so why would we need to put more money into Zika? I mean, it's nothing we have to worry about. Yeah, so maybe not necessarily Zika, but Zika dengue and research into how to control the 80s Egyptis mosquito populations because the carrier, the vector of this virus is really where the problem lies. And we may get this accelerated as the Olympics goes on. Towards the end of the Olympics, as the medals are being handed out, we start to get people on the boxes of cereal or are promoting a particular brand of snack or sandwich shop or something. So you're suggesting they would promote those particularly? I was going to get some people like, hey, let's pay attention to Zika. Hi, I just won the gold medal and now I have Zika. Let's do something about this, shall we? We need brand Zika vaccine. I get some really popular new celeb representation of this disease very soon. Sadly, and whatever. Well, maybe we'll get some funding then. Convenient. That would be convenient. All right, this is this week in Science. Justin, what do you have? Okay, what do I have? Okay, so a little while ago, scientists using zebra finches pinpointed the gene that enables the birds to produce and display the color red. We talked about it on This Week in Science. It was on the show. So now a new study shows the same red gene is also found in turtles. What's interesting about that is that turtles and birds are very sort of distantly related, but they're related down a chain. So they share a common ancestor with birds that predates dinosaurs. Here we go. Potentially. No, no, no. Well, no, that's they actually do. They actually share this lineage. It's not potentially. It's highly, highly probable that the gene predates bird separation from dinosaurs and dinosaur separation from the common ancestor with turtles. The gene, CYP2J19, we're just going to call it red gene, allows birds and turtles convert yellow pigment in their diets into red, which they then use to heighten color both in their vision and in their plumage or on their skin in their vision, because they use this as through droplets of oil in their redness, which is how they get their color vision. Birds and turtles have these red retinal oil droplets which operate like lens filters on the incoming light. In fact, they actually have this is we're talking about the gene. They've identified that produces this red, but they actually also have green and yellow oil droplets as well. And what these do is they allow greater separation of the range of wavelengths so that each cone responds to these different filtered wavelengths, differently giving them much greater sensitivity to color. You and I, Kiki, but not Blair, may be able to tell the difference between a handful of reds, but birds and turtles can see a rainbow of reds and every red that we just call red. That's red, but they're seeing a whole bunch of versions of red across that spectrum. Since some birds a few turtle species have red pigment produced by the gene, it's also used for the like the beaks, feathers, there's red-necked patches on painted turtles. Some species have it on the rims of their shells. It is possible that the ability to see a better spectrum of light also allows red markings to convey more information about the health of potential mates. This is other studies that they've done. They say, hey, look, this one's red is this red, and that's that red. And we know that red is more healthy, so we want to mate with that red, right? That's birds and turtles. That's birds and turtles. Scientists mined the genetic data of various bird and reptile species to reconstruct the evolutionary history of the red gene, and they find that it dates back about 250 million years. That's back to the arkylosaur genetic line, which is the ancestral lineage of turtles, which then dinosaurs later left, and then birds, of course, from dinosaurs. Turtles split off first, which is what's key in this. There are creatures from this line that don't have it. You can look at, I think, it's the crocodiles' alligators. Well, no, sorry, crocodiles came later. Alligators, I mean, not alligators, but lizards, snakes, that sort of thing, they actually split off earlier, and they're thinking, well, it's possible that it was before the red gene had sort of come into play. There are species that like crocodiles that don't have the oil, but there's also other species that don't, and they've sort of tied it to being nocturnal for a long period of time. You sort of lost the necessity of the spectrum of color because you were looking at different radiations. Boom, okay, so there's that. Since dinosaurs split from this lineage after turtles, which are related to birds, the strongly suggest that they would have carried the red gene and had the enhanced red vision, if not the other colors of the spectrum, from the retinal oil, which is, and why I have this red gene vision, if you don't plan on using it, right? So it is possible, nay, probable that dinosaurs produced bright red pigment on their skins for purposes of display, and possible, nay, likely that they could have seen a wide array of colors as do birds and turtles. And if you've got it, you flaunted or at least used it to convey some sort of information, so we may have possibly, with unknown probability, had dinosaurs of tremendous markings and colorations, and that they have this ability to see it and produce it. Yeah, and maybe not even markings and colorations that are visible all the time, but maybe only during the breeding season for specific purposes. Yeah, I find it a fascinating idea. There has been evidence looking at dinosaurs and other, especially the feathered theropods, that they had lots of colors. They're finding pigments in the preserved feathers. They're finding pigments. Knowing that that's a very good chance here, that dinosaurs didn't just haphazardly do this, that they could actually see color and see a much wider spectrum than we do, it would make sense that they would utilize this ability. So we need to start putting a lot more red markings on our dinosaur drawings, is what you're telling me? Yellow and red. Go ahead, when your kid is going to draw in a color and a dinosaur in a coloring book, don't just give him an army green pen or army green crayon and have him go at it. Give him a whole spectrum of colors to play with. Yeah, orange, red, I don't know, maybe even throw a purple in there. Who knows? Kiki, now you're just being ridiculous. I know, I like crayons. What was it that I've already forgotten the beginning of my own story here? This is red that they've drilled down on and can show that it was all the way back, but it's likely the other oils, which I think were green and yellow as well. Maybe sort of look at how green, yellow, and red show up so much in colorful plumage and birds. Yeah, these are some likely color spectrums that they could have gotten a lot of use out of. Absolutely. That's so cool, so cool. All right, this is This Week in Science. We're not a bunch of dinosaurs here, but do you know what time it is? What time is it? Is it that time again? It is. It's time for Blair's Animal Corner. What you got, Blair? Oh well. And we're done. I have an orangutan who has a very interesting ability. It's an orangutan named Rocky. It's literally the name of my first dog. And he has the key to potentially some information about how we developed speech. So the kind of conventional wisdom about speech is that it's something that as a learned behavior and as something that is, to our knowledge, other animals, particularly other apes, cannot mimic anything that sounds like speech. That most likely it happened after we broke off from the common ancestor to modern day apes. Rocky has some new information. So he lives in the Indianapolis Zoo in Indiana. And between April and May of 2012, he took part in a very interesting experiment where a researcher made random sounds with variations in the tone or pitch of her voice that Rocky then mimicked. What makes this interesting is that they compared each of these sounds against the largest available database of orangutan calls, which is collected for over 12,000 hours of observations of more than 120 orangutans from 15 wild and captive populations. And they found that these sounds that Rocky was making, mimicking this researcher, were completely different compared to the database. So he learned new sounds and controlled the action of his voice in a conversational context to make something that the researchers call vowel-like. So this is something that has up until now not really been seen. There was a study last year that came out with a female orangutan called Tilda from the Cologne Zoo in Germany who was able to make sounds comparable to human consonant and vowel-like calls at the same rhythm and paces human speech. But it was not done in this learn by listening method, which is really based on what we know about the way speech develops and the way we learn speech is essential to us figuring out where speech came from. So the fact that Rocky could hear a researcher make these sounds and copy the cadence, the pitch, something like the sounds means that he did, in some ways, learn by listening. Yeah, and there's this, you know, is Rocky typical, or is Rocky like a genius Shakespearean brilliant orangutan? Yeah, so this is an anecdotal study. If there ever was one, there's a single orangutan named Rocky. What we can do from this is we can look at other apes, we can look at other orangutans first, I'm sure, but then we can look at other ape species. Then I think what we really would need to do is do some brain mapping. I would be fascinated to see what it looks like when this orangutan is doing this versus what it looks like when a human child is learning speech. Right, because the question is, it's sound imitation, but is it speech imitation? Was Rocky really trying to learn sounds or imitate the sounds in a way that would lead potentially to something, some meaning at some point? And I think what they're trying to say here is not that he's trying to learn how to speak, but that he has the cognitive ability to do things that in many, many generations after evolution could end up turning into speech. So basically what they're saying is that he has the building blocks in his brain for what could be speech. So based on that, they're saying that we did not, it was not some giant jump from our common ancestor with apes to where we got to with our speech now. It looks like there might be some building blocks farther back on the family tree than we thought. And it could be much more advanced than that. It could be also that Rocky's looked at, okay, the ones that do this valley mumble thing get to come and go as they like. If I just do a valley mumble thing, maybe they will think I am one of them. Or maybe it's just absolute orangutan boredom. And that orangutan was sitting there in the zoo going, I see this place all the time. Nobody knew it comes in. Oh, here's somebody new. Oh, that's weird. You're silly. Bored. And there's nothing to it. He's just mocking her. He's mocking the researcher. And I thought about that too, that I've seen Jane Goodall speak. And at the beginning of each time she speaks to a group of people, she teaches them how to say something in chimpanzee, which is fun. But the question is, do chimpanzees have their own language? And I think that we've talked a lot about on the show how different species have their own quote, language, right? So based on what you know about that and wanting to talk about speech, I feel like it can get very muddled. I agree. Because if chimpanzees have a language of their own, certain shrieks mean certain things, then what exactly did we learn from the study other than that these orangutans learn by listening? Which I would hope that's how chimps learn how to speak to each other. And I think that there's a lot of scientific belief previous to the study that a lot of animals and in particular a lot of apes are reactionary with their sounds. So instead of a certain shriek meaning a certain thing, they make a certain shriek in response to a certain stimuli and that makes it mean a certain thing. But then where is that different from a language? Right. So a language is more complex. Right. But there is more to it. We might be trying to convey a message instead of responding to a stimuli. Yes. Animal communication is a set of signals. Signals can be sounds or just gestures. We have hand gestures that are signals that go along with the sounds. But then we also have a complete lexicon that has evolved to mean very complex things, to convey very complex messages. So we just have a larger bank of symbols, really. Absolutely. And so the question is, do these orangutans have the ability to learn a complex group of symbols the way that we do? And I'm not surprised to see what Rocky has to tell us. But then again, it's one orangutan. So this is a good starting point. The great thing about experiments with animals like Rocky is that this is a great basis to propose future research. And it's much easier to get funding for research on orangutan brains of communication if you have a reason that there's something to look for there. So Rocky has definitely given us something to look for. Yeah, and Ed from Connecticut is asking right now, isn't there a gorilla named Coco? Yeah, there's Coco and there's also a chimpanzee named Kanzi. And I forget the name of the, there's another chimpanzee as well. But they learned sign language, supposedly. And it's a question as to how much they actually understand how complex their languages versus what, or their use of the sign languages is what the handlers want to think it means. This is the problem with this animal behavior, animal communication research. It's not like you have these Coco or Kanzi or these others really willing and able to communicate with a lot of other people. I mean, these are dangerous wild animals. So you have a very limited number of people who go in and are pretty biased to begin with as to the result that they want to discover. And there's a BBC, there's a brand new BBC documentary out about Coco right now and I believe it's playing on KQED tonight. But it's out through the BBC, so it might be available to people very soon, generally if you have not seen it yet. I hope that not only digging into Coco's life but the gorilla in captivity who's being studied for these sign language communication abilities that they also dig into the biased investigator side of the story as well. I don't know that they're going to, I haven't had a chance to look at the documentary yet. Yeah, I think it'd be pretty difficult to design a double blind study when you have to do sign language with a gorilla that only talks to certain people. So for the double blind, you would have to have a situation where one person does the teaching and then several other people do the understanding or translating of that sign language. And I don't know if that's, and there need to be more than just a couple of animals which is still the problem with Rocky which is the problem with Coco with Conzi. It's unfortunate we don't have enough animals to do this with. Yeah, absolutely. And now moving on to another kind of communication. The age-old communication, perhaps even older than language of music. Music, sweet music. So is musicality strictly human? That is a very good question. I have seen many a parrot on YouTube dancing to music. Yeah, so there was a famous cockatoo in 2009 called Snowball who was very good at dancing to music. I think his favorite was Mashi Boys, if I recall correctly. But then in, I think it was 2013, and I'm trying to find the exact date. There was a sea lion named Ronan who was able to dance to music. He was able to keep beat, or she, excuse me, she was able to keep the beat to a click track which was their main experimental method. A click track is like a metronome. Yes, like a metronome. Yeah, and then the other thing, they would use it to all different kinds of music including what they call her favorite, Boogie Wonderland. That's because the sea lion probably watched Happy Feet. Probably. I mean, it goes without saying. So Ronan was able to dance to music at all different beats per minute, all different rates, all this kind of stuff. And so in this 2013 study, they were able to really latch on to the fact that she was figuring out how to dance to the music. The sea lion had rhythm. She had rhythm. So then in a more recent study that just came out in Frontiers in Neuroscience, they wanted specifically to look at how she can adjust to a changing beat because that's how you would usually test a human's sense of rhythm to see if you've got rhythm, I've got music. So it's if you can keep up with a change in the rhythm if you can move and realign yourself with an adjusted rhythm. And so they definitely should have played the police and Sting. They go back and forth in their time signatures all the time. Or some Dave Brubeck. Dave Brubeck, there we go. Get some of the interesting jazz that goes between different time signatures. Oh man, I played some Dave Brubeck and I broke my sea lion. Yeah, so they tested this by either altering the click track or playing Boogie Wonderland at a bunch of different beats per minute and speeding it up or slowing it down. And they tested if a simple mathematical equation could account for the data, the way that the internal metronome and the metronome of the music that was altered, you can picture them kind of like pendulums. And at a certain point they match up. And there's a mathematical equation to figure out how that would most quickly sink back. And the sea lion proved true to the mathematical equation. So she is really re-sinking to that music as pretty much as efficiently as she could. So now the question is, this is one sea lion. Here we come back to the animal studies with one animal. Great sea lion with rhythm. She's really got it. Is this something that all sea lions can do? If it's not just sea lions, is this a mammalian trait that we should just broadly be able to extend to mammals, sea or land? And finally, how far back would it go and why? Why have rhythm? Especially if in this study they say rhodon and sea lions, they're not versatile vocal animals. They're not mimics. They're not like the orangutan who is copying things all the time. What are they listening to and why? Yeah, exactly. And so that really was the jump here was that parrots, which we've done a bunch of studies on and apes, can copy sounds that they hear. But the sea lions, they make some pretty ridiculous sounds, but none of them can really mimic a sound that they've heard unless that sound they've heard is another sea lion. So they're different elements of the brain. And previously it was kind of expected that they were linked, that the vocal mimicry and the rhythm keeping areas of the brain were related. But it looks like most likely they're not, as far as we can tell, if rhodon's rhythm is indicative of the species. I'm going to go back to Coco just for a second. Yeah, go for it. I've been thinking of this throughout. It occurred to me, forget, why just one? You need two gorillas or two chimpanzees that can do sign language. And then, it's not if they're using it with the trainer, but if they were to use it with each other. Exactly. That would be extremely... Well, but then, just a couple generations down, you see the Statue of Liberty sunk in the sand. It's coming anyway. It's coming anyway. But I mean, because I guess I can sort of see like, a human may think that they're communicating with their dog because they say things and the dog follows that command. And that's a one-way communication. But then there's, of course, the animal is in a way communicating back by executing the understanding and illustrating the understanding of the command and by maybe holding a leash in its mouth. By the doorway, it might be saying, let's go for a walk or even with the bark. So there is some... We can pick up on cues and have some level of interaction and communication of understanding of mind between human and the animal because we are not that far removed. But when we're talking about using abstract communication like a sign language for like asking for an object that's not in the room or something, I think it would be more fascinating to see if, to realize the two chimpanzees, would utilize that for a thing that they don't have another way of communicating with each other. But do they not have another way of communicating? I think that's the step that you're... That's the conclusion that we jump to. Well, that's us expecting them to both take up sign language and use it with each other. We have to remember that this is a species that's been around in some cases for longer than we have, and they communicate just fine. So there's probably something they're doing that we're not catching up on, that we're not seeing. And that's where this is potentially not going to work individual to individual within a separate species. But this is why I meant that when I actually... When I said something they don't have a word for, I meant within gorilla language, maybe. There's an abstract object. This red bouncy ball or something that they... Or something like chocolate. Or something that's not in... That wouldn't be in there. That was not easily described that they would need to... Nuclear war. But let's remember too that I think it was last year I brought up how there were chimps in a zoo that got apples all the time and there was a chip from another zoo that had never seen an apple. He came, they taught him how to say apple in their chimpanzee language. So I still think if these animals are communicating properly without our help then they don't have to take on our methods of communication. They have their very own. So that's, I think, the part where this would be difficult. How do you encourage a gorilla to use sign language with another gorilla? The reason they're using sign language with us is because we don't speak gorilla. If Coco had a baby gorilla, do you think they could teach the baby gorilla sign language? Yeah, that's why it's sad. Coco's sad. She never had a baby. So we lost her. Now I'm going to take it back to the sea lion again because as we're jumping back and forth between story conversations here the thing I find really interesting coming from a neuroscience perspective is that if you're talking about rhythm, what you're talking about you're talking about oscillating groups of neurons becoming activated, right? And responding to that. And so within the brain for all sorts of different purposes we have, it's basically there is a constantly oscillating cycle of different groups of neurons turning on and turning off. So maybe rhythm is something intrinsic. I would say it probably is. I mean just think about heartbeat. Yeah, your mother's heartbeat is the first sound you hear. Yeah, and then we say in music the hardest tempos to take are the ones that are slightly different from 60 beats per minute because 60 beats per minute is roughly what your heart does. So if you take, if you have a 70 or a 50, it's really hard to keep and the band as a whole keeps trying to push back to the 60 either way because we are so ingrained with our heartbeat tempo. Yeah, and then we have things like walking. That's exactly walking or running. Those are oscillating neurons. And so these, it's all, it's all oscillation. And so if those, those muscles. And then anything that adds like a swimming pattern or a flight pattern or a running pattern should be sort of running this rhythm. A breathing pattern. A breathing pattern, fantastic. Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. That's where the rhythm could be coming from. Yeah, yeah. The rhythm's in us. You want to talk about wolves really fast and then we'll go to the break. Sure, real quick. So gray wolves, very apropos since we released a video this week about gray wolves, but Mexican gray wolves, the most endangered gray wolf subspecies. I want to talk about gray wolves, just plain gray wolves, which are listed as endangered under the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, but they are set to no longer receive their protection from the Endangered Species Act this fall. That's because the Fish and Wildlife Service has discovered eastern gray wolves and red wolves that actually have their own territories that are not part of what they thought was the gray wolf territory. And for all of these reasons, it's very complicated, but basically having these other two species of wolf in the space or subspecies has made them delist or they're going to delist the gray wolf. But a new study looks at the genomes of all North American wolves, gray wolves, eastern wolves, red wolves, coyotes, and they found that both the red wolf and the eastern wolf are not distinct species, but hybrids of gray wolves and coyotes. Now this, I found this fascinating for a couple reasons. One is that in college, which was a while ago now, I had a professor who said, I really don't think the red wolf is a wolf. I think it's a hybrid of a gray wolf and a coyote. And bam, I want to call them up on the phone right now and tell them, you are right. But it turns out that the red wolf is about 75% coyote and 25% gray wolf, and the eastern wolf is about 25% coyote and 75% gray wolf. And what this means is that there are no eastern wolves. There are no red wolves. There are gray wolves. And there are coyotes. And there are hybrids. So if now people are taking this information to US Fish and Wildlife to try to keep the gray wolf on the endangered species list. This whole basis was that there were these other subspecies that were in these areas, but really all these areas that are supposed to be protected wolf space are gray wolves. So can you then just delist the red, the hybrids? So this is the question now, is we have to start asking ourselves, it's back to the same question. What is a species? Do hybrids count? Are hybrids worth saving? And are hybrids species? Because we always said that a species is a genetically distinct population that can reproduce with itself and make viable offspring. So if hybrids are doing that, are they now a species? Or are they all one species? What percentage of different DNA makes a species? At what point do you delineate a species? A species versus a subspecies versus a hybrid. When everything is really a genetic continuum. Exactly. And we're trying to put things in boxes. How do we do that? And does any of it really matter when it comes to the Endangered Species Act? I would say probably not. Probably if there's a type of animal that needs our help, we should probably just keep them on. Yeah, I think part of it is looking at everything which we've begun to do over the past couple of decades from an ecosystem perspective as opposed to the species perspective. And while it's important to protect certain species because they're keystone species that really hold together an ecosystem, like if you don't have the wolves, the deer populations go out of control. It all tumbles apart when you take out the top predators. But at the same time, every species fills a certain niche within an ecosystem. It's not just a hybrid of a coyote and a wolf. It is an animal that is filling a particular role. Exactly, yeah. And so even if the red wolf didn't exist a couple hundred years ago and it's only existing now because these populations are getting pushed together because of human activity, does that mean they don't deserve our protection? Or does that mean they need it even more because they're a new population that is fulfilling a need that we need help fulfilling? That we need help getting done? So if the red wolves are doing the job that we need done, does it matter that they're not a real species? And then from a just-in-type perspective, if we're talking about bringing species back from extinction, that we don't know whether or not they're hybrids. We just know they were a species that used to fill those egos. Let's bring them back. Let's do it. Did we know all of a sudden? I mean, when do we make these decisions? Well, here's what we make the decision. We make the decision to do it. And then we look at what happens. So here's the thing. So more people were dying in car accidents hitting deer with the wolves sort of on the brink. They've come back and there's less deer. There's less people hitting deer driving in the middle of the night because deer run across the road much more than wolves. Wolves are less likely to eat you than you are to die from a car accident with a deer. But then, yeah, a woolly mammoth might come in and eat up so much vegetation that the deer are like, ah, there's not enough easy pickings here. Let's just go somewhere else. And then you've got to know that you don't really know. And that's just maybe an example that I could come up with. But you don't really know the impact. But it may be favorable. It may not be. But the cool thing is you'd have a woolly mammoth. You know, we're never going to have buffalo or even bison roaming the plains like they once did. But, you know, we find a way to preserve what is part of the heritage of this continent. One could say that life finds a way. You could say that, but it actually doesn't in the face of mankind. In the face of mankind, life kind of tends to die. So we understand that we have tremendous killing power and can come up with all sorts of reasons to kill anything, whether it's, you know, our own safety, our development needs to go in so we don't want wolves in the suburbs or it's getting livestock in the rural areas, whatever our reasons we come up with, we have to ignore all of them because we know it's all backed up by a little too much killing power and soon we'll have no animals. And to get away from our killing power, we haven't killed you with the science yet. Have we? No. We're going to soothe you. Invigorate it. Invigorate and soothe with more sounds of science. Which will be coming up in the second half of the show. We are going to take a brief break right now and we will return with more in just a few moments. Stay tuned. Hey again, I just want to say thanks to everyone who subscribed to us on YouTube. Thank you so much for getting us over that 10,000 subscriber threshold that we were aiming at and now we're, you know, 10,000, almost 10,200. We're climbing, climbing, climbing and it's all because of you and I just want to say thank you so much every time you subscribe to us on YouTube. It just makes me happy. We're trying to grow our channel over there so it makes a big difference that you've done it and since you did subscribe, maybe you found out that we published a twist short. Blair went to the San Francisco Zoo. I went to, but I was behind the camera and we published an interview with the director at the San Francisco Zoo talking about Wolf Canyon and the new Wolf display. The new Wolf exhibit that is at the San Francisco Zoo. So I hope that you enjoy that interview. There's some neat little nuggets of fun and information and education in there and we'll have more coming for you very soon. 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We really could not do this without you. I find it, I find the button. We're back with more This Week in Science as long as I can figure out how to unmute myself. You are unmuted. So tell me about your oily palms, Joy. This is a menace that is threatening forests across four continents. It is a threat not only leading to massive deforestation, but the species that we've been talking about that live within them, regardless of their protected status. It cares not if this is an endangered animal. It is rapidly destroying habitats, reducing biodiversity, increasing greenhouse emissions at the same time it is reducing the planet's ability to deal with rising carbons. The dangerous nature of this culprit has been detailed by Duke University-led study. Palm oil production has expanded from Southeast Asia into tropical regions of the Americas and Africa. Largest areas of vulnerable forest now are Africa and South America. Where more than 30% of forests within land suitable for palm oil plantations remains unprotected according to the study. Recent rates of deforestation have been the highest in Southeast Asia and South America, particularly Indonesia, Ecuador, and Peru, where more than half of all palms are grown on land cleared since just 1989. Almost all palm oil, this is quoting, is grown in places that once were tropical forests, says Varash Vijay, doctoral student at Duke, by identifying where the greatest extent of palm oil-driven deforestation has recently occurred and modeling future expansion is most likely. We can guide efforts to reduce these adverse impacts to this Vijay, in other words, start protecting some of this forest that you know is going to be going down next. Palm oil is now the world's most widely traded vegetable oil according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. The oil which is harvested from palm oils and its derivatives are common ingredients in many processed foods and personal care products. This global demand grows. Large swaths, swaths of tropical forests are being converted into palm oil plantations in 43 different countries. Using 25 years of high resolution Google Earth and Landsat satellite imagery, her team tracked the extent of deforestation in Southeast Asia, Africa, South America, Mesoamerica, which includes Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. They modeled where future deforestation is most likely to occur based on the recent expansion. Yeah, so these are all four regions containing high concentrations of different mammal and bird species that are at risk of extinction, and so we need to be acting quickly. Now, if you would like to assist tropical forests from the wildlife and the wildlife that depend on them, the moment in which you can do is now. No, you don't have to get a passport and pass it through some rural tropical forest and join a native people's monkey wrench gang in order to effect change through acts of industrial sabotage, though that would be awesome and I would be personally impressed and somewhat envious of you for doing this, but you can also create change by simply refusing to purchase products with palm oil in them, which might be a lot harder than you think it is because products contain... Yeah, products that contain acetyl pommelate, pommelotil, alcohol, palm kernel, palm kernel oil, palm fruit oil, palm stern, anything basically that has the word palm anywhere in the text is on this list. Palm oil also, though, has some aliases as any good criminal might, which include acetyl alcohol, emulsifiers, generally, glycerocytate, and laurel sulfate, sodium kernel. This is like shampoo. So it's sodium laureth sulfate? Yeah, it's laurel sulfate and sodium kernelate and steric acid. So if you see any of those, that's also palm oil. Whereas still, it is often merely considered vegetable oil, which then makes it impossible to differentiate. So just an example of foods. Cheerios, Chexmix, Cool Whip, Natural Valley, Granola Bars, ice creams, pretty much everything ice cream. Quaker Oats, Ritz Crackers, Pringles, Hershey's, Chocolate Mars, Snickers, Swissmas, Nutella, all contain palm oil. That's just about any craft, Kellogg's, General Mills, Nestle product that you can get your hands on. Pretty much anything made by Proctor and Gamble from dish soap and deodorant to toothpaste and tampons. And while it may be impossible to get it right every time, every time we do get it right makes a difference. So please, if there is a possibility that you could make a list, Google for some help on the internet and avoid utilizing palm oil, just do it. And even if you don't get rid of everything that's palm oil in your cabinets, in your refrigerators, or in your medicine cabinets, or in your shower stall, the few that you do will impact positively. Yeah, and definitely... I've kicked them off the soapbox, but I don't have a soapbox because it probably had palm oil in it, so I didn't buy one. Yeah. When you're trying to be sustainable with a bunch of different things, palm oil being one of them, encouraging companies that label things as palm oil free is also great because that does drive the people, the big players who have palm oil and everything, suddenly, if they can charge an extra 20 cents for something that is palm oil free, guess what? They will stop using palm oil. It's all about the fact that the palm oil is cheap and it gets them where they need to go, so if you are buying things actively that say palm oil free on them, they will eventually start to go for that. And we're seeing that with things like sustainable seafood. Now, more and more things, it's been a slow uphill battle, but more and more things are labeled sustainable, or restaurants will say all seafood on this menu is sustainable. If a restaurant can start to say no palm oil in this restaurant, that would be pretty cool. Yeah. And the other part of this too, somebody says if I cook with palm oil, no, cook with olive oil. Who doesn't cook with olive oil? It's fine at high heat, it smokes down later. We actually had that study, right? Yeah, your olive oil is actually, even though it starts to smoke a little quicker than the other oils, it actually breaks down molecularly much later than other oils, which will break down and start smoking. But also you can use high heat oil, you can use avocado oil, this works pretty fantastic. But vegetable oil, I don't know what's in vegetable oil. Vegetable oil could be nothing but palm oil. Who knows? They can identify this thing in any which way that they like. By a specific oil, canola oil. By a specific oil, and then maybe we can put together a list of products to avoid. It's pretty much all of them. So actually I think it would be easier task to find a list of products to use, but don't have it. And I think this is the most important point, because we've been talking for years about deforestation and people have been given messages about conserving not buying products and trying to help the forests so that they're not lost, so that the rainforests aren't lost, so that help the world, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But, meanwhile we're buying these products and nobody tells us that the things that we're buying are actually increasing the deforestation. So we're recycling our cardboard. We're using totes when we go to the supermarket. But our cabinet is full of 10 acres of tropical forest. That's thrown down to produce the palm oil. We need to be vigilant people. And it's kind of a scary list when you look at it. I guess you just go through and look at products on your own when you're at the store and look for the ones that really are straight up palm named stuff and that's an easy way to go for it. There is a website deforestation.com that I just found that has listed a bunch of products, but they say that projects are subject to change from county to county. So, anyway it's fast. This list is long. I just keep scrolling down. And the World Wildlife Fund also has another page for products with palm oils. There are guides. Google it. Google it. Yeah, no Brazilian cherry cabinets that are full of palm oil. Right. Clear sign that you're in violation of being an eco warrior. I love it. I think Blair has a laugh track going on for us in the background. On a subject that's not so funny we had to inject some laughter in the back there somewhere. Okay, it's time for us to get a little frosty. You ready to get frosty? We are going out into outer space to Jupiter because we've been talking a lot about Jupiter recently and so let's not just talk about Jupiter. Let's talk about one of its moons, Io. We love this geysery moon. We know it's got a frozen. It's a frozen moon. It's got this frozen surface with fractures all over it and there are geysers and spewing that come out from the volcanoes all the time. It's a very active moon. A while ago, researchers suggested that it does have an atmosphere although very, very small. It's about a billionth the pressure of Earth's atmosphere at sea level. It's a very, very light atmosphere but it has an atmosphere. It's a lot of that atmosphere lovely. Yeah, not so great for us. Great for little volcanic bacteria, extremophiles maybe, not so great for us but researchers were like, okay it goes through Jupiter's shadow as it's orbiting the planet. Going through that shadow is going to make it pretty cold and it's going to really cool down the atmosphere and so researchers said maybe that thin atmosphere turns to frost and then falls to the surface of IO as a frosty like snow. But they didn't really have any way to prove it. They didn't have any observations but now we have these observations. They've used a ground based telescope not even a space telescope but a ground based telescope and they've been looking at the moon in the far infrared wavelengths and so they've been getting the radiation off the moon and so they have found that as IO passes behind Jupiter as it goes through that shadow it cools from minus 146 degrees Celsius already pretty cold right to minus 168 degrees Celsius. It's enough to cause 30% of that thin atmosphere to turn to frost. And so this is just published in the Journal of Geophysical Research Planets and then as it comes back out of the planetary or solar eclipse out of that shadow this is that's about two hours out of every 42 orbits or so or 42 hour orbits so two out of every 42 hours they're in this frozen state the eclipse is over, the sun comes back warms it up 20 degrees or so but it's just enough to unfreeze the frost and that sulfur dioxide frost evaporates out and goes back into the atmosphere again yeah so now Ios Volcano spewing sulfur dioxide creates a little atmosphere that freezes every once in a while turns into sulfur dioxide ice frost that falls for two hours in the dark and then the sun comes out and it evaporates and goes away and no more frost no more sulfur dioxide frost I just thought that was fascinating it makes me want to send extremo files see if we can it's a moon, it's not even a planet come on, it's something that's right you just turned into a robot I think we have an hour time limit for you on the show before you turn into a robot I don't know what that's all about last time it didn't even give me that long fix yourself I'm going to keep talking the first private moon landing has been okayed the federal government has finally given the okay for Moon Express a private company so it would like to be the first to win the Google lunar X prize which is a significant amount of money, 20 million dollars isn't too shabby Moon Express really really wants to do this and they have a small lander, it's called the MX-1 lander it's probably about the size of coffee table my table here that my computer is on it's very small, not a large thing at all, weighs much less than NASA missions to the moon, is going to have a lot less equipment but they're very very hopeful about being able to get to the moon and help explore the moon to unlock things like water ice and make it available to people helium-3 which would be very helpful as well and they want to be part of this effort to commercialize the moon, but permission is the first thing because really we've never had anyone other than governments going to the moon and this is something we talked about last week with Phil Plait when he was on the show is that every country who's space bound has an agreement which is we're all in this together, nobody's going to take ownership and nobody's going to get this stuff but when a commercial entity gets into it how does that all work copyright symbol on the moon that's going to be brutal all of a sudden the federal government had to basically write new documentation, write new forms for people to fill out that had never been filled out before make new instructions for private companies going to celestial bodies in space so this is an interesting new process, boldly going where no man has gone before well no private lander has gone before and there's a loophole I've already found it which is that whoever gets there first can form their own country which is not on the earth and not therefore beholden to earth laws I think you're making things up but we'll talk about this in the after show Justin do you have another story? I do so this is for decades researchers have been able to cram ever more components onto silicon based computer chips this success is why today's smart phones have more computing power than the world's most powerful computers of the 80s which cost truckloads of buckets of money and were the size of refrigerator which made them very hard to lock it this is why we had parachute pants in the 80s but at some point you reach a limit to what you can fit on a slice of silicon now a study published in journal science may signal the end of the predicted end of Moore's law the idea that researchers will find new ways of continuing to make computers smaller faster and cheaper lasers are a central part of today's optical communication systems researchers have been manipulating lasers in various ways commonly by funneling different signals into one path to carry more and more information but these techniques specifically wavelength division multiplexing and time division multiplexing are also reaching their limits what will we do? well thanks to the University of Buffalo School of Engineering and Applied Sciences we have a new way to use lasers by manipulating the orbital angular momentum which distributes the laser in a corkscrew pattern don't ask me how with a vortex at the center they have created something called a vortex laser oh my god that's the coolest thing I've ever heard so usually this thing is too large to work with today's computer UAB University of Buffalo team was able to shrink the vortex laser to the point where it is compatible with the computer chip as the laser being trapped in the corkscrew pattern according to information in two different vortex twists it is able to carry 10 times more amount of information than conventional lasers which just move linear old linear lasers just going in a straight line how primitive it's just one component in a race to find the faster smaller bigger cheaper quicker advancement but even if it had no useful application it is still awesome to know that there are such things as vortex lasers being developed oh I have a picture of a vortex laser here we go it's hot pink of course it would have to be hot pink now this is a visual depiction of the vortex laser okay and for those of you listening at home it looks sort of like cotton candy it looks like a hurricane or no excuse me a tornado hurricane of cotton candy that seems to be hovering over some sort of sporting center I don't know why well any development that we haven't had in lasers this is exciting and promising for opening up new technologies right this is going to speed things up yeah and there's the quantum computer thing coming this is also going to be very much involved in the transmission just picture a 10 time faster computing speed but also a connection to the internet that's 10 times faster I don't know how much faster it really needs to be but it will be and perhaps even we'll get to a point where it's reliable reliability is fantastic and some place we like that to be reliable brains right yes we like to have reliable brains but who amongst us can claim they can really trust their own brain for too long right well we like to have reliable nice brains and when you think of or you've heard of the way neurons work with each other you know you have one end of a neuron that comes to an end and it's like a end synapse and then it connects to the other another neuron right and they have this communication area in between the two neurons this area is the synapse and the ends of the neurons they're called synaptic boutons so the synaptic boutons are facing towards each other they're not touching but they're right close to each other and there's this little space in between and we have this imagery so neurons work where the sending end of the synapse will release a vesicle or a little package of neurotransmitters into the synapse and then those neurotransmitters dissipate, diffuse across the space until they come into contact with the receptors on the receiving end of the synapse and thus you have the continuation of the action potential and of a signal and eventually behavior that's different than my mental image of a neuron but mines of a traveling salesman from the 40s who has the door about to be shut on and puts his foot in the door it's just the moment of your time a quick demonstration of this wonderful thing that you need to know that if I was I'd be doing you a disservice by not telling you really this is what I'd be letting you down by not giving you this image you have a very interesting image another one people might have is the idea of a lock and a key or where one side of the synapse maybe has a key that fits into the lock on the other side and turns the lock to open the door to make things happen well this is very very very close to what's actually happening but it's even more interesting than that some researchers just they're like we really don't know how this all lines up and what's really happening and our imaging technology is getting so much better now we can look at the ends of these neurons these synaptic butons at the receptors at the proteins the pre-synaptic proteins the post-synaptic proteins we can look at them and we can locate them and we can see where they are and so for the first time they're like okay let's do that so published in Nature researchers looked at some proteins called then RIM2, Monk 13 and bassoon anyway they looked at these proteins and they tagged them and then looked at where they were located and so they found that some of them were clustered together very locally but bassoon was kind of evenly spread across the synapse throughout the post-pre-synaptic bassoon is like evenly spread where say RIM1 all of the RIM1 proteins were kind of clustered together and they called them these nanoclusters and then they're like okay so let's tag vesicles to see where the vesicles are lining up when they're going to leave the pre-synapse and dump their neurotransmitters out where do they go they found that they went to the nanoclusters wherever there was a high concentration of these protein nanoclusters where the vesicles were so one protein they looked at RIM1 was really located in regions that would generate these vesicles of neurotransmitters they found RIM proteins on the post-synaptic side as well and they're like okay where are these lined up so right now we've got proteins on the pre-synapse side clumping together, vesicles going to where the proteins are clumped and now we're finding that there's also clusters on the post-synaptic side and then they discovered that those clusters on the pre- and the post-synaptic side are lined up like puzzle pieces so they're matching each other they're anticipating they're anticipating and so their final experiment they went in and they messed up the proteins and they discovered that when they messed up the protein location the signal production they weren't talking to each other anymore it messed up the signal and then it took them a long time the synapses had a really hard time fixing it again too so there is very precise alignment of this at the level of the synapse for the messages that are being sent across this is the first time we've ever been able to dig in with this resolution to the neurons it's very interesting that is interesting and it's kind of intense because it's it's almost as though your the brain is such an amazing thing but it's almost as though your brain is like you're going to receive a message I need all four of you to pick up a piece of the message over here and I need four of you to receive because it's going to take four of you on either side to be able to get this message so we're going to play a telephone they're each going to give you one word just remember that it's as though the brain already understands the communication is going to take place before it takes place by aligning things and anticipating the communication that's ridiculous it is ridiculous but the best thing about starting to get this level of understanding about how the synapse works and the fact there is this it's not just random neurotransmitter diffusion there's actually like targeted aiming that happens and now that we know this and we know that messing up the proteins messes up communication now we can start looking at genetic mutations that maybe mess up this kind of stuff how is this potentially involved in disorders of the brain is there something we can do to start fixing it so there are some really interesting directions that this could go yeah yes cool brain science yes brain you will divulge all of your secrets to us like vortex lasers by the way just so it's clear I am the brain you do work for me you understand the hierarchy here it's brain and then whatever human being you think you are comes much much much much later your sense of self is a subroutine I run but it's I am the brain you are just a measly human I am the brain that's right I've got some really quick stories to run through super quick from last week the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory reported that they had pinpointed some toxic compounds from electronic cigarettes we've been talking for a while about the safety of electronic cigarettes so they published environmental science and technology about the thermal decomposition of propylene glycol which is supposed to be very safe and glycerin also very safe solvents found in most e-liquids but there are toxic compounds like formaldehyde and acrylin that come from them but the researchers say ah we found toxic chemicals so they're not as bad as cigarettes really not as bad as cigarettes but quote from the researcher Hugo Destillat Destillat advocates of e-cigarettes say emissions are much slower than from conventional cigarettes so you're better off using e-cigarettes I would say that may be true for certain users for example long time smokers that cannot quit but the problem is it doesn't mean that they're healthy regular cigarettes are super unhealthy e-cigarettes are just unhealthy they're just unhealthy as opposed to super unhealthy so the lesser of two evils but still not painless exactly that reminds me of the election we have going on oh boy this is this weekend science and speaking of some really cool science some science is funded sometimes from very interesting sources and a couple of papers that were recently published on finding genetic variants of amylotrophic lateral sclerosis or ALS were funded by the ice bucket challenge so if you remember a few months ago when everybody on the internet was pouring ice over their heads and donating money to ALS research the money actually did go to ALS research and variations in a gene were found present in approximately 3% of cases of ALS but it's at least a little bit of a breakthrough in terms of understanding the genetics of the disease and the researchers say was only possible because of the collaboration of all the scientists involved I mean these are scientists from all over the world collaborating on their genetic sequences for about the genomes of about 15,000 people with ALS and it is a prime example of the success that can come from the combined efforts of so many people all dedicated to finding the cause of ALS and basically the ALS ice bucket challenge enabled the ALS association to invest in this work so challenges like that are not just things to joke at sometimes the money goes where it is said to go sometimes this had a great scientific result congratulations things that don't have great scientific results are there are noses the company headed by very the world's youngest CEO not really but Elizabeth Holmes who has been banned from operating a lab for two years because of her trouble with selling blood tests to consumers that were not accurate hers was the we can use a drop of your blood and tell you basically super what diseases you have we have this amazing technology she sold it to the world I mean sold it to a few pharmacy companies who started using sending their tests to her and basically giving people inaccurate results that affected their health outcomes negatively anyway she's back in the game and she just went to the American association for clinical chemistry conference to report on their newest work which is to produce a what's called the mini lab that she says will someday be able to run 160 different assays from lipid panels to Zika tests but the issue is she didn't actually she just didn't actually present any externally validated results which she never has and which has always been part of the problem so she's a wonderful PR machine wonderful PR machine and then finally my last story of something that could be super duper duper cool is the 2016 international space challenge which if you have not heard about it this sounds pretty cool you could have the opportunity to design something to be 3D printed in space at the international space station for use on the international space station not just would you get to design and have it printed in space but you would design it with Grant Imahara who used to be on Mythbusters who's a roboticist and engineer and actually a very nice person so it's a design challenge if you are interested in helping the astronauts on the ISS consider entering this is a challenge that's been put on by Mauser electronics and the 3D printing will be done by the company made in space which is the first 3D printer in space and it sounds like a really cool thing nice so you can check that out at Mauser.com slash Empowering Innovation slash ISS project you can find it we'll put the link on the website anyone else have any stories real quick this is St. Paul Island in Alaska which if you're not familiar with Alaska is 400 miles north of the Aleutian Islands which you're probably also not familiar with if you're not familiar with Alaska it's probably that bearing straight between Russia and Alaska that was frozen many thousands of years ago they had previously found five mammoths that they had dated through radiocarbon remains dating to about 6480 years ago they were kind of curious they wanted to know are these the first the last like how long were these creatures there looking at the last ones were they there more recently what happened to them and they took a pretty interesting tact and that they studied spores from fungi that grows specifically on large animal dung and they extracted these from lake cores and within a hundred years give or take they said yeah that 6480 year ago date is probably the last or very close to being the last on this island but it's one of those things where you look for your evidence not just at the thing that you're studying but at all the other things that are connected to that thing that you're studying so I applaud this this clever way of narrowing down the date they saw rapid decline in that hundred years after of this fungal sport nice and Blair flying shortens your telomeres if you're a dark-eyed junko migrant versions of these birds had significantly shorter telomeres than birds that stayed put year-round suggesting that migratory birds were aging at a faster rate and that the stress of a migratory lifestyle may actually shorten birds' lifespans so there's a new indication that stress does in fact shorten your telomeres so it's not worth it everyone calm down and then my all-time favorite story for tonight that I brought back from last week since I didn't get to talk about it lichen there's that story of the fungus and the algae they took a lichen to each other the classic story of symbiosis and in fact the term symbiosis was coined to describe lichen about 140 years ago well it turns out there's a third party involved this whole time and it's yeast so there's algae there's fungi and there's yeast in lichen and the way they figured this out was by finding two different types of lichen one that had a lot more yellow in it and another that was less so and they looked at it and the fungus and the algae were exactly the same in these two distinct types of lichen but the thing that was different was the amount of this yeast then they went on to look at a bunch of different types of lichen and they all had yeast in it the city of my seat yeast was in every single lichen they looked at so turns out this whole time yeast is part of this symbiosis what's it doing in there that's a great question and a great Tom Waits song I know I love that song what's he doing in there what's he doing in there that's what I want to know about the yeast it's those magazines wrapped in the plain paper alright enough it would be funny if that got us kicked off of youtube they're like oh, copy written song but I think step right up is really my favorite Tom Waits alright that's not science either that's for the after shift so I think that must mean that we have come to the end of yet another episode of everybody's favorite science show this weekend science but we have still yet a little business to conduct there are a number of people for instance who listen to the show and contribute to the show on a monthly basis in that list of people that list of people is so important to us they are so crucial to the operations of the show have I have I treaded water long enough kiki are you ready for the introduction of this show that we want to tell you who they are I would like I would like in to take this moment to thank our Patreon sponsors thank you so much to Chris Clark Paul Disney, Dave Freidel John Ratnaswamy, Richard Odomas Byron Lee, EO, Jared Lysette Lizzie Adkins, Kevin Parachan Keith Corsale, Jake Jones, Patrick Cohn Bob Calder, Mark Rosaros Ed Dyer, Trainee 8-4 Sarah Chavis, Layla Marshall-Clark Charlene Henry, Don Cumberidge Galeri Garcia, Randy Mazzucca and Tony Steele Steve DeBell, Haroon Sarang Melissa Mosley, Alex Wilson Jason Schneiderman, Rudy Garcia Gerald Sorrells, Greg Guthman, Dave Naver Jason Dozier, Matthew Litwin, Eric Knapp Jason Roberts, Craig Landon, Daryl Lambert David Wiley, Robert Aston Orly Radio, Brian Condren Pixelfly, Marked, Nathan Greco Hexator, Deborah Smith, Mitch Neves Flying Out, John Crocker, Richard Porter Sylvan Westby, Artyom Shuwata Dave Wilkinson, Steve Mishinsky Rick Ramos, Gary Swinsberg Phil Nadeau, Rodney Lewis Braxton Howard, Sal Good Sam Matt Sutter, Emma Grenier, Phillip Shane James Dobson, Kurt Larson, Stefan Insom Michael George, Russell Jensen Mountain Sloth, Jim Trapeau, Tara Payne John Maloney, Jason Olds, James Paul West Alec Dodie, Aluma Llama, Joe Wheeler Dougal Campbell, Craig Porter, Adam Mishgon Aaron Luthan, Marjorie Paul Stanton David Simmerly, Tyler Harrison Alambo Ahmed Thank you for all your support on Patreon If you're interested in supporting us you can find more information at patreon.com slash This Week in Science Also remember that you can just help us out by telling people about twists Tell three people about twists this week It'll help us and you'll feel good about yourself On next week's show we'll be broadcasting live online once again at 8pm on twist.org slash live on facebook.com slash This Week in Science twist.org slash live those where you can watch and join our chat room Don't worry if you can't make it though our past episodes are available at twist.org slash YouTube and just twist.org Thank you for enjoying the show Twist is also available as a podcast Just google This Week in Science in your iTunes directory or if you have a mobile type device Call it a phone if you like Twist, T-W-I-S, Number 4, Droid App in the Android Marketplace Or simply This Week in Science in anything Apple Marketplacey For more information on anything you've heard here today show notes will be available on our website Where's that? It's at www.twist.org Where you can also make comments and start conversations with the hosts as well as other listeners Or you can just contact us directly email kirsten at kirsten at thisweekinscience.com Justin at twistminion at gmail.com or Blair at BlairBazz at twist.org Just be sure to put twist, T-W-I-S somewhere in your subject line or your email will be spam filtered into oblivion using a vortex laser on the twitter where we are at twist science at Dr. Kiki at Jackson Ply and at Blair's Menagerie We love your feedback if there is a topic you would like us to cover and address a suggestion for an interview please let us know We will be back here next week and we hope you'll join us again for more great science news And if you've learned anything from today's show remember It's all in your head This Week in Science This Week in Science This Week in Science This Week in Science It's the end of the world So I'm setting up shop Got my banner unfurled It says the scientist is in I'm gonna sell my advice Show them how to stop the robots with a simple device I'll reverse global warming with a wave of my hand And all it'll cost you is a couple of grand This week science is coming your way So everybody listen to what I say I use the scientific method for all that it's worth and I'll broadcast my opinion all over the earth Cause it's This Week in Science This Week in Science This Week in Science Science Science This Week in Science This Week in Science This Week in Science I've got one disclaimer and it shouldn't be news That what I say may not represent your views But I've done the calculations and I've got a plan If you listen to the science you may just get understand That we're not trying to threaten your philosophy We're just trying to save the world from Japanese Japanese This Week in Science is coming your way So everybody listen to everything we say Automatically No, This Week in Science This Week in Science This Week in Science This Week in Science Science This Week in Science This Week in Science Science I've got a 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 But how can I ever see the changes I seek When I can only set up shop one hour a week This weekend science is coming your way You better just listen to what we say And if you learn anything from the words that we've said Then please just remember it's all in your head This weekend science This weekend science This weekend science This weekend science This weekend science This weekend science This weekend science This weekend science This weekend science This weekend science This weekend science This weekend science Doobie, doobie, dooo, and scene. This begins the post show. For those of you who don't know, this is the part of the show that's not the show. It's kind of the show, but not really a show. This is where we hang out. We talk to each other. We talk to people in the chat room and tell people to not be afraid of this because I'm not going to start another hangout for it. So that's fine, right? We're good here. We're all good here. Tell people to not be afraid of three and a half hour long YouTube videos. Nothing to be afraid of here? Nothing. Nothing to be afraid of. Maybe. Just maybe. Nope. Nope. I'm not going to do it. This is just it. I like putting time codes in my description on YouTube so people can just follow what I do. Yeah, people. Yeah. I hope you like the time codes in the descriptions on YouTube. It helps, right? Mm-hmm. Why are we talking? You guys are talking about Pee Wee Herman in the chat room. It's because Konki's in the chat room. Konki's in the chat room. It's true. What's the secret word? Pee Wee. What's the secret word? I can't laugh like Pee Wee Herman at all. I should not even try. I end up sounding more like a deranged penguin. He wasn't Buffy the Slant Vampire Slayer. Right. Oh, and Yanni did the Ice Bucket Challenge, Januski 7. Mm-hmm. Ice Bucket Challenge. That's right. Who else in here did the Ice Bucket Challenge? I didn't. I had nothing to do with helping people with ALS. Well, we talked about it. We did. We did talk about it. Didn't do it. Pee Wee Herman is the birth father of the penguin. What? Oh, good, Ed. You like the time codes. Yeah, Konki, be on time. We're here. We're in the chat room on time, at least, usually. Even if we don't start. Oh, yeah, Brandon B. Thank you for running the Facebook simulcast. That can go. It can go for four hours. Awesome. Because it was originally like only a 90-minute thing or an hour-long thing, but now four hours. Awesome. Let it run. Awesome. We're still on Facebook. Have you seen us there, everyone? Hot Rod, you ate ice. Yeah, yeah. I chewed on ice. I chewed on ice. I did, I've done that, yeah. Dar, that's funny. If you live someplace that's that cold, doing the ice bucket challenge, you're like, really? Really? I don't know. Yanni, oh. Yanni was. What the? He's cold in Finland. I lost the chat, somehow. I'm watching it. He's a cold. He's ready for the cold. That was the challenge. Yanni challenged us. That's right. I forgot. I just remember watching Yanni do it. Did we never do it? We never did it. He was so good. He did it. I think it's a little unfair. And I'm just going to say this. No, it's so cold. That's why I didn't do it. Dar and a chat room who says it's very frozen where he is, and so doing an ice bucket challenge seems very unappealing. Look, it's the degree of difference in temperature. When it's 100 degrees, do you do an ice bucket challenge? It's way more painful than if you're already shivering and frozen. This is what I'm saying. I'm just going to. If you're already cold. Yeah, whatever. So when I spent six weeks in Greenland, and oh, wait, let me have a person. You've talked about this before. We know you've been there. This is a photo of me. And in Connick, I'm standing on this whole entire bay that you see behind me was frozen over. And there was one rain, and it broke up into these two icebergs. And I'm like, I'm a little bit out to sea. And if this thing started to move, I was ready to bolt. But it wasn't really that cold, honestly. It really wasn't. I think it was in the 40s the whole time I was there, because the sun didn't go down. The sun was out all the time, so it stayed kind of warm. When I got there, 40 degrees compared to my normal disposition was really cold. It never got, and it didn't heat up. It didn't really cool. Now it didn't heat up beyond that 40 something. But by the end of the six weeks, I was having my cup of coffee on the front porch and shorts and a t-shirt. And it was just felt normal. Got back, landed in Copenhagen on the way back, and was sweating through my clothes. And I wasn't even wearing a t-shirt, same kind of t-shirt. Sweating through, it was like, oh my gosh, there's a heat wave. It was 73 degrees. I had so climatized to 40 as being normal that 73 seems like a heat wave. And then something really scary happened. This is probably the most terrifying realization that I ever had. Suddenly, it started to become dark outside. And it just was like, there's nothing I could do to stop it. There's nothing I could do. I realized I was powerless to prevent the entire world from going completely dark. Because this is what happens that I'm not allowed to change. It was so bizarre. The first time it got dark, I'm like, it's dark. How do people live like this? You can't go outside. You can't go for a walk. You can't go things close. It's suddenly dark. And I understand when people live where places where it snows all the time, it's also like, now you just don't go outside. You're done. If it's you, stay indoors. Very bizarre thing. But I really appreciate it. I would like to move to Greenland for every summer for a couple of months of all-day light. It's such an amazing, amazing place. Yeah, that's what I got. I was lucky to go to Norway for some time during the summer. And that was awesome. It is light. It's that constant light. And it's just beautiful. It's a little bit, it is a little weird. Just as it being dark is a little weird. But you're more likely to be up and doing stuff. So when it's light, you're more likely just to kind of stay up with it. Right, OK. So this is what was weird, though. This is another. Then it's dark, and you're like, I'm going to go to bed? Because I'd seen some cop show insomnia where a detective from probably New York goes to someplace in the arctic where it doesn't get dark. And he's awake for like 84 hours or something, trying to solve this case. I slept when I first got there like 12-hour stints. And I think it might have been just because the oxygen was so rich. I don't know what it was. But when I first got there, the first few days, maybe even the first week, I would sleep like 12 hours a day. It was so strange. But yeah, it's an interesting change in the environment. Totally. Totally, totally. But you know, like with climate change, Ed from Connecticut is saying that Greenland's going to be the size of Davis, very likely. And places where it's like Dar is saying it's hard to spit. You know, maybe it'll be balmy. Yeah, so questions about the. This was about a year end. Hang on a second. This was about a year end starting twist. And we were already talking about global warming back. And I think this was that picture is, I think, 2005, as I think when this was. And so I'm asking people, if they've noticed, a difference in climate change. And what was really fascinating is it was like, yeah, not directly, you know, it's not like the hunting season had changed too dramatically. But the Inuits don't have maps. They don't use them. What they do, what the hunters do, and they go out, which they were just finishing up their season when I got there, because the bay was still frozen over, is they go out with these sled dog teams. And they go out over the sea ice. And it's how they get up and down the coastline to go hunt for Marwale and Walrus and Seal and whatever else. But they don't have maps. What they do is memorize the coastline. They memorize ice formations. And they have this incredible, like it's like a taxi driver in London memorizing every street. They memorize every ice formation. This is how they know where they are. And it's been passed down through generations. They don't show a map. And like, here's where we're going to hunt. They go through a litany of describing the coastline as you go up and what it looks like. And they have all these, again, they knew it, have thousands of words for ice and ways of describing it. And this is what they had noticed is that it's getting really hard to navigate because the coastal ice formations are changing. And this is back in 2005. So that was a really interesting tidbit of insight into how it's affecting the Inuits who are far enough north to not see perhaps the drastic temperature changes but still are affected. Yeah, all melting that's going to totally affect their hunting and what they can do, their institutional memory. That's going to be crazy. Blair, what were you going to say? She's all muted now. I was going to ask about, so I've always been really fascinated about the shift in the amount of daylight and nighttime. And I have traveled a lot laterally, but I guess I haven't traveled a lot up and down. And I wonder how much even just traveling a little bit north, like five or six hours, you do start to see a difference. So right now, you might get an extra 30 minutes, 45 minutes of sunlight, even just traveling a handful of hours north. So it starts to change really rapidly. And I think that it's something that, like you were talking about, you're just awake all the time. You're awake a lot more. That really messes with your circadian rhythms. And I always wonder what it's like to live there and to have half of the year where it's dark all the time, half of the year where it's light all the time. Right, and it was shouting. How do you not go insane? Like, did these people have something genetically because they've lived there for generations that allow them to adjust to that? I think, I don't know. I think you climatized to it pretty quickly because there was like, I know what they have. Oh, let's hear it. Let's keep this on hand. There would be kids who would be playing, and you'd look and it would be like, oh, they're playing at 1.30. And then you'd have to figure it out. And it's like, oh, they're out there playing and it's 1.30 in the morning, not 1.30 in the afternoon. And time seems kind of like the AMPM things becomes extremely irrelevant. I think people have death metal and vodka. They really, really do take advantage of their summer months when they have them. The people from the north are much more likely to travel and to take advantage of those hours in the sun when they do have them. So they do stay up later. They spend a lot more time doing things outdoors during the summer months because it does, because they are so much more limited during the winter. So they behaviorally do change. Yes, they sleep more in the winter. Their behaviors change between winter and summer. And I know it's obvious, but I guess it hadn't occurred to me. But I was having actually this conversation with my friend Roy, who had grown up in Louisiana, moved to California, sort of northern California. And he had noticed how bizarre it was that it could be 8.30 to 9 o'clock at night and still be light outside. Whereas just in New Orleans, it never got dark. So there was like an extra hour or hour and a half of light that took place in California that didn't take place in New Orleans. And he had, as you totally noticed this, how far north are you? It's light till 10.30 to 11 there. Dara, where are you? So this weekend, I'm in Alaska. But he's on the road now. Right, because he's usually Eric and A.K. Now he's Eric on the road. I'm traveling north of Ferndale. I'm traveling pretty far north. It's not that far north. In terms of California, it's as north as you can get. We're going pretty much straight up to the border. So I'm still south of it. I don't know if I've ever driven north. Like I've flown to places that are higher up in latitude. But that's different, because you get on a plane, you get off the plane, you're in this new space. But I'm actually going to travel and get to see a difference as I go north. And I also don't know if I've ever traveled north during summer months, either. So I think it'll be interesting to see. Ferndale, I think, is kind of nice. Eric, you're in Portland. I'm in Portland. It gets dark here about 8.30 or 9.00 right now. And in the, I guess around June 21st, it was getting dark around 9.30. So it gets dark around 9.30. It stays light-ish until around 10.00, because of dusk. But sun goes down about 9.30 at the next to Portland. That's here in Portland. Alberta, Canada, nice. That's right, Janice Kew says, well, winter is coming. Winter is coming. There's no stopping it. We are on the downward slide to shorter days. And then the days will get longer again. And you'll see me smile once more. But again, this is that thing. It's like the shortest day kicks off winter. So then winter is just longer days. Yeah, they get longer and longer. Yeah, winter makes just getting, having longer days the whole time. The kickoff of summer is the longest day. And then all the days of summer become shorter. That's actually true. They should be shifted. What do you want to shift? I don't understand. You want to shift what you call summer? It's just sort of, it's not necessarily running with the temperature, is what I'm saying. Because you don't have, as the days get shorter, you run into the hottest days, or at least around here. And you don't have those same degree of hot days when the days were just as long. And it was spring. So there's more to wetness, the angles of the sun and everything else. But we live on a planet that's constantly revolving in the moon that even spins, though slow enough to be tidally locked. We go around the sun, and the sun is moving into migration in a galaxy. And this galaxy is probably moving in some sort of larger migration of floaty things in the universe, and everything now spinning around a single solitary thought in my head. Is it, I'm always confused by this. In terms of alcohol consumption. There's softer than hard, you're in the yard. But there's also harder than softer, you're in the loft. I can never, there's somebody tried to teach me that you can go from one type of alcohol to another, and it's okay, and you go from another to another. But I have anecdotes that work in both directions. But as Willie Nelson said, there are more old drunks than our old doctors, so I suppose we should have another round. Have you noticed my wine glass? Very nice, nice, classy, very classy. Classy all the way. Classy, college down, that's how we roll. No Willie Nelson for Eric. What conference is in Portland this weekend? Fun conferences? Yeah, Minion Dale, I haven't heard from Minion Dale in a while, yeah, he's in Saskatchewan. He's been doing, he like works on electrical towers, but he's also part of a search and rescue team, so they've been apparently out practicing searching for and rescuing people who get lost on hikes or something. Yeah, yeah, cause people go out and they hike and then they get lost, and you need to find them. They play Pokemon Go while they're doing it. Oh my gosh. Okay, so, silly, silly story. Mark Masaros, who is one of our Patreon sponsors, listeners, he sent me a story that was, it just had me giggling, that people were upset because they went out playing Pokemon Go in public, in a public park. And there was a woman who was drunk in public, and so she was harassing the kids who were playing, and then she urinated and pulled up her skirt and urinated in front of all these kids. They're probably traumatized forever, and here I am giggling. I'm like, well, you went out in public and you just haven't been taken in yet. There you go. We got two calls today at the zoo for people trying to go into areas they weren't supposed to be in because they were following the Pokemon. It's very silly. Like people, if there's a sign that says don't go in there, don't go in there. Don't go in there. Doesn't matter if there's a Pokemon in there. Don't go in there. Okay, thank you. Yeah, I don't know. People go out and they're playing Pokemon Go and then they're upset that they're seeing somebody, that something happens. They see somebody who's homeless, has an alcohol problem in a downtown area and they're offended maybe. I don't know, maybe Pokemon Go hopefully will put people in situations where they're going outside and they're actually seeing that homelessness is a problem and maybe people will do more about it as a result. That would be great. Yeah, let me see. I have a friend who started a, if I can find his, a friend who started an app and of course it's like, oh, another app, but this one is a very useful app. Let me see if I can find it. Where if when you see somebody in an area who is homeless, you can click on the app and a charity organization will donate. An organization will donate to a charity that helps homelessness in that area. So it's like, you're not actually donating money yourself, you're just telling people who want to help people who are homeless, where the homeless are and that there are homeless in this area who need money. And then it's not that the homeless is getting money but organizations that find them housing and bedding and food and all sorts of stuff can help them out. Where did it go? Find it and then I can tell you guys about it. Kiki, how was your birthday? Oh, yeah. Happy birthday, I didn't know it was your birthday. It was not your calendar. Look at your twist calendar, it's on the wall but I think it's done last month or the month before maybe still. If you haven't turned your calendar over, you wouldn't have seen it yet, yeah. Happy birthday, Kiki. Thank you, yeah, I had my birthday and it was fun and I want to say thank you to everybody for all the wonderful birthday messages on Twitter and Facebook and all over the place. It's fabulous, it was very, it was a nice birthday. It was lovely, I got a bicycle for my birthday. Oh, that's why you posted the picture of you on the bicycle. I got a bike for my birthday. That's pretty happy, fun. Yeah, yeah, because I have a bike currently but it's a one-speed cruiser that is really rusty and the chain falls off and it's creaky and it has coaster brakes. It's been to Burning Man probably one too many times. It's so dusty. And I live in a place which is great for biking except it has slight hills. Not like San Francisco where major hills. We've got slight hills. Where Davis was pretty flat, you could do things. Davis was completely flat, yeah. One-speed coaster, no problem. You can totally do it. But once you start going for hills and trying to get up even small hills and pulling a trailer behind your bike with a child in it, suddenly it starts getting very difficult. And then you've got coaster brakes and you're not stopping quickly. So I got myself, I didn't get myself but I got an eight-speed with brakes. Years of brakes. I'm so excited. I went on a bike ride with some friends who lived in Santa Cruz, or outside of Santa Cruz. And it turned out to be a really hilly part of the outside of Santa Cruz. So we were either like, oh, we're just going for a ride around the block. And these guys have like cross-trained with the Olympic bike team. They're like serious road bike people. But they're just going around the block. I'm lucky to go wrong. It was the most brutal, like I'm stuck. Even if I give up on the exercise now, I'm at the bottom of a canyon on a bicycle. I still have to do a lot of work even to quit at this point. Like it was so rough. Canyons, it's a little bit different for bike riding. Yeah, I haven't gotten into like the mountain biking or anything like that. I just want to get around town. I want to get around my neighborhood. Have a good time. Doot, doot, doot. Have a bell on my bike. Maybe take my child someplace, you know? Yeah. I think it'd be fun. Nice. Oh, another study that we didn't talk about that I just needed to say something about. The flossing, the whole flossing thing. And it wasn't a study. It wasn't like a study said that flossing is not useful. Yeah, or bad for you or not useful. Basically, it was a lack of evidence in any direction. So there have been, there haven't been enough studies. It's not a well, flossing is not a well-funded area. So when they say four out of five dentists, they literally mean four out of five dentists. Yeah, that's how many they talk to and asked if this made sense, yeah. Yeah, so the take home on that is that if you floss, it's not, probably not do anything bad for you and it might be removing annoying food from between your teeth. So maybe keep it up if you want. If you don't floss all the time, then maybe that's not a big deal either. Yeah, so there's also, also, I remember listening to, I don't remember what it was on. It was like some sort of, some sort of sciencey, like this, like I don't know if it was Science Friday. It might have been, it might have been Science Friday. But it was somebody saying basically if you brush your teeth once a week with chicken soup, okay, it's about as effective as using the whatever packaging branded toothpaste, whitening, cleaning, cavity preventing thing. Like just brushing your teeth once in a while with a liquid is good enough for your dental health that you don't need to be bleaching, staining, treating, whitening, anything, minty, whatever, cavity fighting, like toothpaste is a lie. It's basically what they had come up with. Like toothpaste is kind of ridiculous. Now, that may be true, right? It may be true that for cavity prevention, you don't actually need to do that much to maintain dental hygiene. And it may be more dependent on the bacteria in your mouth, which might have something to do with what you eat, and it might have something else to do with your genetics or what you ate as a child that formed when your teeth formed. But, you know, the quality of your breath might still be dependent on something other than your cavity preventing. A little bit of mint in the breath is maybe not a bad thing, I guess is what I'm saying. A little bit of, no, a little bit of mint on the breath is not necessarily a bad thing. People like it, we've grown to enjoy it. And appreciate it. But you may not actually need to irradiate your toothbrush after your use, as Blair does. And I don't know how you got hold of that grade of plutonium, but I still don't think you should be using it on your toothbrush. Well, you can't argue at these results. Those are some very shiny teeth, which actually might three-year-old out of the mouths of babes, right? It's like, she's like talking about colors. She's really into identifying colors and everything. And she goes, sky is blue. I'm like, yeah, sky is blue. And she's like, clouds are white, clouds are white. Grass is green. Grass is green, yeah. She goes, mama's teeth are white. Yeah, mama's teeth are white. Papa's teeth are yellow. Ha! Ha! There you go. It's all those e-sibs. Oh no! It's actually probably a lifetime of tea and coffee drinking. And yeah, probably a couple other things. But yeah, absolutely. Which, by the way, I drink several cups of black coffee every day. Yeah, but I use it as mouthwash in the morning. This is the difference. I brushed with it, this is how. I also am good friends with my dentist who occasionally gives me free whitening. Nice. Yeah, so, let's see, what is that? There was this review article that I wanna find again that we talked about a while back, I think. But there's this question of fluoridation. Yeah. Yeah, and there was a big review article about fluoridation in water for reducing cavities. Let me say that's the Cochrane collaboration. There are a group of doctors and researchers known for their comprehensive reviews, whether regarded as the gold standard of scientific rigor. Oh, reviews, comprehensive reviews are the gold standard of scientific rigor. They reviewed every study done on fluoridation. This is from a Newsweek article. Every study done on fluoridation they could find and then winnowed down the collection to the most comprehensive, well-designed, reliable papers. And the review identified only three studies since 1975 of sufficient quality to be included that addressed the effectiveness of fluoridation on tooth decay in the population at large. So three studies since 1975. And these papers determined that fluoridation does not reduce cavities to a statistically significant degree in permanent teeth. So that would be for grown-ups. People over eight, basically. I took fluoride pills as a kid and I have had a fantastic run of being cavity free. But there was apparently like, you could cause liver damage or something with them that they figured out after the fact and so they stopped giving them to children. But I've had fantastic results for one off case study. Yeah, and I grew up on well water with no fluoridation. So many cavities. But high mineral content, though. High mineral content, yeah. But I grew up with lots of cavities. And I don't know if that's just a family bacterial thing, but I grew up with lots of cavities whereas Marshall grew up in a place with fluoridation. He has no cavities. So, I don't know. Indians, Kiki Blair, got a role. Fascinating. Me too. Yeah, the Bayou is calling. Bayou. Hold on, so what if we just play ourselves out here? Do we have music? Are you gonna do your nerd dance? You can't do it. You guys, I put that app, We Shelter is the name of the app. I put it in the chat room. They have an iPhone and Google Play app. You can't play it. Can't I play 17 seconds? Isn't that the role? No, I don't know. You're gonna get us banned. I think that's a bad one. No, turn it off, turn it off, turn it off, turn it off. The buffer is, I think, 15 seconds, but okay. Good night, everybody. Say good night, Blair. Good night, Blair. Say good night, Kiki. Good night, Kiki. Good night, millions. Good night, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us again. And we'll see you next week. Thanks again for all the birthday wishes. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.