 Pop into screen right now. There we go, just popping into screen, everybody. There we go, crawling my way into your television set. That's right, we're crawling in here. The twist team, we crawled in here today, we made it. Got here finally to talk about science. Y'all ready for a show? Heya, Arranlore. You think so? I think so. I think I might be ready. Yeah, get it ready, get it ready. All right, everybody, it's time for us to start this show. We call this wing inside, this wing inside. This wing inside. C-caw, c-caw. Everybody be your favorite bird. C-caw. My favorite bird call, it's the begging of baby crows. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That's good. Wow. Blah, blah, blah, blah. Actually, that's more the sound of the baby birds as they're eating the food. I had to pay more attention to the nature. Baby crows are more like, and then the scrub jays are like, right, right, and they screech you like that. I ran into an egret the other day that went, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I like that one too. Yeah, it was really good. Okay, I need to find some egrets and listen to the e-ears. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's so good. That's fantastic. Everyone record your favorite bird song for us and send us your favorite recordings of yourself. I'm personating your favorite bird song because that's fun. Well, here we are in another episode. I hope we all sound fine. Are we five by five? Are we allowed to say that? Five by one. One by five? I'll sell for five by four. 10 by 10. Five by four? Yeah. Four by four. Yeah. Suddenly, we are off-roading in the world of science. Oh, science off-road. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Oh, I see where this show is going already. Everyone, Blair has warned us that California has a power grid problems. I don't remember what the exact words are. It was like a power flex or something where, like, it's called rolling blackouts. It's too darn hot. And they expect everyone to run their AC at the same time and they don't think all the grids will make it, so. They're not gonna make it, Captain. I think I'll be fine in Redwood City. I mean, I don't have AC, so it's not that hot right here, but it was 90-something in my office today, so I don't. So let's talk about science. We'll see. I think it'll be fine. I think I just want to imagine, like, the lead engineer at PG&E having, like, the Scottish accent from the engineer from Star Trek. He's got to have more power, and then he's like redistributing power to engine number five, Captain. Yeah. Anyway. Divert power from shields. What could go wrong? Yes. Diverting power from San Francisco. Yes. Yes. So Blair and Justin may or may not make it all the way through the show, but it's great stuff. Oh, yeah. And you're wearing your trek shirt. I'm ready for everything. I got this. I think we're just doing the after-show pre-show. Yeah. Shields up, everyone. Shields up. All right, time to check. I don't know what you're going to check. I'm just going to start this. Am I checking something? My computer's on. Check your track orders, everyone. Are we ready to go? This can't be right. Hi, Justin. This is funny. Jess is the one who's now exasperated by these two. No, no, it's always the case. That's just, ladies and gentlemen, I apologize for the sometimes rambling, periodically unprofessional behavior of my co-host. Let's get right to this science. We haven't usually started recording yet. How come we're live? Well, we are live, yes. I mean, this is recording, but like. What else are you talking about? What other show are you doing? Ladies and gentlemen, there's apparently been something put into the waters of both San Francisco and Portland. Well, reports are just now coming in of the effects of this unknown substance. Oh, no. It's obviously clear. Nobody should be driving or operating heavy machinery until scientists can figure out what the heck is going on. Good Lord. Laugh till you cry, people. Laugh till you cry. All right. It is hot down here. I know it's not San Francisco and Portland, but yeah. It's time for the show. Are you ready to do this? I'm going to. Here we go. We're going to do this. We are going to do this. Begating in. Account of three, two, this is twist. This Week in Science, episode number 835, recorded on Wednesday, July 28, 2021. Who wants to crisper mosquitoes? Hey, everyone, I'm Dr. Kiki. And tonight on the show, we will fill your head with mosquitoes, Neanderthals, and pterosaurs. But first. Disclamer, disclaimer, disclaimer. For some, life is a brilliant chance to explore the unknowns, to take on the challenges of collecting data, forging an understanding of how things work and in doing so seeing the world without the veil of human bias. But for most people, information is rooted in what they believe, not what has been rigorously confirmed. Yale University poll conducted late last year shows that the majority of Americans believe global warming is happening, 72%. We'll ignore the other 28% for now. Actually, let's just ignore them completely. It's not the only thing they're going to be ignorant about and it's only a matter of dreadful moments before they segue into talking about the other ignorant beliefs they are metastasized with. More interestingly, is that while that 72% believe global warming is real, only 55% believe that most scientists think global warming is happening, which is an astonishing reveal. It means that 17% or more of Americans who believe global warming is happening think it's the scientists that still need convincing, if there was only some way to reach them. Further, it found that only 57% think global warming is caused by human activity, which means then 15% of Americans could think that global warming is happening, that scientists haven't figured it out yet, and that it's just a natural phenomenon. Information, assumptions and conclusions based solely on what they believe to be true. And it's an important note here that while climate change is often framed as a political issue, it isn't one. It just seems like it because 100% of elected officials in the US who deny climate are Republicans. And while they are only a slim majority in that party, they are the majority in power and hold tremendous influence on what many people believe. While all of these numbers are the way they are because maybe it's the 25% of Americans who reported only hearing something about global warming once a week. What all this suggests is that to get real climate action, all we need to do is convince the media to cover it so that more scientists will believe in it. Because once scientists are on board with something, the next thing that happens is this week in science, coming up next. I've got the kind of mind I can't get enough I wanna learn it happen every day of the week there's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek. Thanks to you Kiki and Blair. And a good science to you too, Justin Blair and everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of This Week in Science. We are back again to talk about science. Every time I say that, I'm like, I'm gonna say something else. And no, no, we're just, it's science because that's what we talk about. This past week in science, what happened? A lot of things and we're gonna talk about them. I have got the mosquitoes. I brought the mosquitoes to the show this week. I apologize, but I think some people might appreciate this story. All their people might not. We may talk about it a little. Additionally, I've got some more folding and some human genome news as well as a story toward the end related to baby mouse dreams because those are interesting. What do you have, Justin? I've got Neanderthal blood. Bees on caffeine. Of course. Bees on caffeine, oral biome history and some really, really bad news. Oh, are we gonna just do that first? No, I was actually, I have a whole thing right. I'm gonna end my portion of the show at least with the worst possible news. And then we'll go off the mouse baby dreams. Okay, we will go off the mouse like that. We will go off the mouse baby dreams at the end. All right, Blair, what is in the animal corner? Well, I have a story about dogs that know you're lying. I also have baboons and Fitbits and baby pterosaurs. Oh, we've got babies on the show today. Yes, we brought the babies. If all of you out there are listening with your babies and you wanna make sure that they hear the show every week, know that you can subscribe to This Week in Science. We are a radio show, but we are also a podcast. You can find us all places podcasts are found and you can find us on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitch. We are also Twist Science on Instagram and Twitter. Our website is twist.org. All right, now let's dig into the science. We're gonna, I'm just gonna go straight to that pointy little proboscis and we're gonna talk about mosquitoes. We just, we'll just start right there. With the reality, the scientists are working very hard to try to get rid of them. They are and we have talked before on the show about the idea, the new technology, the evolving technology, which has made its way to the forefront in not so much as the vaccine, vaccine research, but also in animal research. It's called gene drive. How can we put a gene into a species that takes over and doesn't let other variants of that gene exist anymore? So that for, in the case of mosquitoes, put a certain gene into the mosquitoes and they can no longer bite their prey because it changes the shape of their, their face basically changes the shape of their face. They can't bite their prey to transmit the parasite that causes malaria and so many other viruses and diseases. Additionally, they can crisper in a gene to make it so that females can't lay eggs anymore. By doing this, if the gene takes over, suddenly you have an entire population of mosquitoes who can no longer bite their prey or lay eggs. And what is the outcome of this kind of a population? Death, they die, not us. The mosquitoes die. So the goal is to reduce mosquito populations and reduce disease in humans. But what was your point, Justin? What do you wanna say? Well, I was, you know, from, I like, if there was one thing that I would just say remove from the planet without any sort of regret, it's always been mosquito. Yeah. However, I then learned that they are major pollinators. And now I think it's a really, really, really, really bad idea. They are major pollinators and they are a major food source for other species. So if we get rid of them, what happens then? So with the gene drive, you hope that something like this will stay within a particular species and that it won't jump between species. That was not what I was gonna ask about. Yeah. So far we don't know the answer to this question, but the study that is out this week in nature has achieved gene drive in populations of mosquitoes in a lab to kind of virtually real scenario. So we're not talking about mosquitoes in little tiny aquariums. They have built climactic chambers that are supposed to have more realistic environmental aspects to them. And this is part of the process of testing gene drive is, the question is, you can make these things happen in the lab and you might get to 99% suppression of other gene variants and 99% effectiveness of the gene that you stuck in there that's driving its way through the population making its way through 99% of the population in the laboratory. But what happens out in the wild? What about the individuals that get eaten? What about the individuals that just die? What about the individuals that just can't handle the cold? How do their genes just do things change when you put them out in the wild? And so they stuck them in some very large feeding cages and showed that lo and behold when they put the gene drive in these populations, it still worked. So laboratory two, realistic-ish situation. It works, gene drive still continues. So, the whole idea of gene drive jumping from mosquito to anything else seems to me implausible. Like not just like, it might not happen but like I don't even know how you could create that to make it do that. Like that, you know, I mean, like to even engineer something that he would want to do it would seem impossible. So I don't think that's a fear but like all of, like you were saying all the things that feed off of mosquitoes. Right, they didn't have any of that in there. There were no bats. No bats in these cages. Yeah. But then it's sort of, if we can do this, why can't we give them like the butterfly provision? Something when they can change their diet and eat something else. Transmortify them into a creature of our own design. Just selective breed them basically. Just make them a much less dangerous version. Yeah. I mean, I think if we could, and these are the bioethical conversations that need to take place, which yes, this seems to be working but what happens when it does actually get into the field? What exactly does that mean? Knowing that it is, that this bridge situation with the large field like cages for this paradigm of studying gene drive not in the field, but close to it. And then we're gonna learn more about how the gene drive works in this situation. I mean, that's good. It's the ethological way to study this, but we still have to have these questions of is this the kind of gene that we want to change population structures? Is there some other gene that we should be working on? Is there, yeah. Should we just be affecting feeding behavior and not ability to produce offspring? Should we, are there better technologies? So the real ethical, the real ethical way to go would be to alter our own genes so that we were not appeasing a meal. That would be the only ethical way to do it is as a species, we would decide to change ourselves deciding to make this whole change for environment and altering another species. It sounds, again, until I found out that there were pollinators, I didn't care. The bats, some bats went hungry, you know, pick another bug. There's other bugs out there, you didn't get them all. But now I'm worried like how we don't necessarily, or we definitely don't have an idea of how important they are to our biome environment. Yeah, I think the, you know, the question is, I think the big question for me is we've seen a lot of gene flow between species of lots of different kinds of species, but mostly plants. But it does happen in insect species as well. And if species, there's such, we think of them in these little boxes but really there's this continuum of one species into another, into another and with subspecies in between. So if you have subspecies interbreeding that could lead to this kind of a gene driving through various populations and getting into different species, then that's the big question. Will releasing something like this into the wild have an effect we can't take back later? And we really need to answer that question. And I think it's still- We're trying to do the experiments, but go ahead. Yeah, and I think it's still a really important thing to explore because malaria is extremely dangerous. That's not the only thing that mosquitoes spread to. And we are already messing with ecosystems due to climate change. So as much as I wanna keep things how they were, mosquitoes are now going where they weren't historically because of climate change. So even though I want to keep pollinators and that's an extremely important thing to keep in mind, you also have to recognize that like, this is kind of a runaway cart with all sorts of things. And so maybe the spread of disease through mosquitoes in places where they're not supposed to be because of climate change could be worse than potentially losing the pollinators themselves. So there's, yeah, it's complicated. I'm just saying it's complicated. I know I'm usually the one saying like, keep everything the same. But this is one of those situations where I recognize it's extremely complicated and this research needs to be done. Yeah. Yeah, I don't think we should stop the research. I definitely think we should continue but I think it needs to be done with continued conversations with communities and we need to have these conversations to see, what do we think about this? What do we wanna do? What's more important? Very interestingly, I'm getting word from the science line here. There's a Danish malaria vaccination on its way where the antibody is transferred to the mosquito when they drink the blood and they have found out that it can kill the parasite in the mosquito. So now you have- That's impressive. Now you have a vaccine that prevents you from getting sick but also is curative to the mosquito. That sounds like a better strategy. You might wanna focus on that one. I'd like you to focus on Neanderthals right now. Okay, so- And their blood. Yeah, Neanderthal blood. So there's not a whole lot of samples out there, right? Before genetics was a thing, one of the ways in which anthropologists could try to determine the origin and migration of human populations was through blood typing. When genetic data became available on humans, blood typing became largely regulated to, or relegated to making sure that you got a successful transfusion. Now the two techniques are being combined in a way to sort of look back into the history of Neanderthal and Denisovan evolution health and some of their vulnerabilities based on their blood work. Now, how do you get blood samples from a 40,000-year-plus-old Neanderthal? Ask nicely. Ask nicely. Give them a lollipop. I don't know. You have to, I don't know. I have to tell you. I'll put it in the microwave. So they have these fossils, and it has been like, yeah, we could get some recognition that there was heme and some very old bones and stuff, but no, they didn't get a blood sample. What they did was they got enough of the genome decoded that they can look at the genes that code for making the blood. And within that, they can see the alleles, they can see the types, they can see basically they can see the blood through just the genome. This is Sylvana Kondemi of the Centre Nationale de la Researche scientifique and her colleagues in France investigated the previously sequenced genomes of one Denisovan and three Neanderthal individuals ranging from 100,000 to 40,000 years old and managed to determine blood types and analyze implications of what was there. So there are some, I guess, there's more than I thought. There's like, it says here 43 different systems for assigning these blood types. And they looked at the sort of most common types first. And they found that Neanderthals and Denisovans are polymorphic for ABO, which is like current modern humans have A and B and O blood. That's not so different. And actually they shared, these blood groups also shared alleles that are recurrent in modern sub-Saharan populations, therefore making it consistent that the idea that Neanderthals and Denisovans have African origin. Something that has not been hugely argued against, but there have been some indications or some talk that maybe Denisovans could possibly have a non-African origin, or at least not as recent. But it looks like, yep, they're consistent with sub-Saharan populations in terms of blood typing. In addition, a distinct genetic link between Neanderthal blood types and the blood types of an aboriginal Australian and indigenous Papuan suggests the possibility of mating between Neanderthals and modern humans before the modern humans migrated to the Southeast Asia area. Neanderthal individuals also had blood type alleles associated with increased vulnerability to diseases affecting fetus and newborns, as well as reduced variability of many alleles compared to modern humans. The pattern, this is in line with existing evidence that we've also found it from other things that links low genetic diversity and low reproductive success with the potential demise of the Neanderthal populations. They also found genes in both Neanderthal and the Denisovan, associated with strong resistance to Norovirus, which can cause upset stomach. And also just goes to show viruses have been everywhere, and we've been doing one with them forever. It's not new. Yeah, so it confirms African origin, some weaknesses in their fertility, and a little bit of virus fortitude amongst our ancestral cousins. So this is published in the Public Library of Science Online. So if you want, you can go check it out. That's free to the public. That's awesome. Your local library of science. And everyone who is on the YouTube channel right now, I apologize for our YouTube chat. We will do some, I'm gonna see what I can do to slow the chat, but I hate to have the people who are conscientious chatters shut out. So Fada, if you can keep working on that, that would be great help. I appreciate what you're doing there. But let's continue. And remember that our chat rooms are safe spaces for our friends, and we're gonna talk about science. So don't be a jerk. Don't use terrible language, and we don't accept that kind of behavior here. All right, as I'm saying it. Yeah. Yeah. All right, Blair. Yeah. Who's your next story? Oh, it's just a little story about dogs. So dogs, they are pretty intuitive. You think they might have, know a little bit about what's going on in your brain based on your body language and what they know about you. And so this is a story that I brought for the Quick Stories because it's an excellent headline, but I think I really wanted to just look at the experiment itself and talk about it for a second. So the headline is that dogs can tell when people are lying to them. So this is from the University of Vienna, and they claim that they can indeed tell if a human is being an unreliable deliverer of information. If they are lying, if they are being knowledgeably obtuse, you could say. So they did a study with hundreds of dogs, and they were taught to follow the advice of an unknown human in choosing which of two bowls contained a hidden treat. This is very similar to stories we've talked about before on the show where they just kind of pointed a bowl and that is the bowl with the treat in it. By following the advice, they get the treat that's in the bowl. Then they allowed the dogs to watch as another unknown human moved the treat from one bowl to another while the second unknown human watched. So then they were able to see that this human knew that it wasn't in the bowl that they were showing them. They also did one for control where the human didn't see where the treat got moved to, and then they came in and pointed at a bowl. And so then they conducted the same experiment. Which bowl will the dog go for? The dogs ignored the human advice if they weren't in the room. So they appeared to not care at all about what bowl they were pointing at because they weren't there, how could they know? So that's interesting. I think that's actually the interesting piece of this experiment is that they could identify what knowledge that human had. But what they claim is kind of the crux of the study is that when the human knew where the food was and pointed at the wrong bowl, half of dogs ignored them. So that to them means that the dogs knew the humans were lying. I would say that means the dog knows where the food was. Either the dog knew where the food was, but I mean, half, 50%, that's like chance. Yeah, exactly, that's my other problem. That's random. That's like, yeah, could be either way. The other thing that's interesting about this is that they then compared it to similar research with humans under the age of five, macaques type of primate and chimpanzees. And in those experiments, the children and the primates were more likely than dogs to follow advice of an quote, unquote, obvious liar over what they knew to be true. So what they're saying is this suggests that the dogs were less trusting of unknown humans with advice. I also think that's kind of a leap. I would also like to know whether they use treats that smelled at all. I would like to know if they did this again with a trusted source, how they would act. I think that this is an interesting first step to recognize that they behave differently than other animals in previous experiments. I think that's really what's interesting. Yes, that's interesting. And I think it's interesting that they knew, like, you don't know anything. Let me figure this out for myself. I think that's really interesting. I don't know if this really points to dogs knowing when humans are lying, but I think it does mean that dogs know what humans know if they're there to see it. So it's almost like they, this is a reach, but it's almost like they can put themselves in the human shoes and be like, okay, I know what that person saw, so I know what information they might have. It almost implies object permanence, which I think is really interesting, but that's a whole nother thing. Anyway, dogs are smart, they're social, they understand how to communicate with humans, and they might be better at that than wild animals and babies. Might be more study needed, for sure. For sure, but I thought it was interesting. Larger sample size. Yeah, yeah. Let's not use treats, let's use food. Let's use toys that don't smell. Yeah, yeah. Yes. Or put them on the other side of a glass or something. Yeah. You know, the smartest animal I ever met was a mule. I believe that. Not a crow, huh? Not a crow, it's a mule. A lot of people think mules are stubborn. It turns out they're not actually stubborn that like if they don't wanna do something, they get that they're bigger than you. And so they just don't. So when training animals, we always talk about kind of like, this is an extra scientific way to talk about it, but basically a bell curve, right? So if they're really, really not bright, they're pretty hard to train because they can't associate reward with behavior. But there's this sweet spot in the middle where they're smart-ish, but not too smart to outsmart the training, right? And so this is where like my dog was too smart to learn to ring the bell to go out to pee because she figured out, I can ring the bell whenever I want and they'll take me outside. Too smart. So you want that middle, not too smart? Not smart enough. You want a dog that is not as smart as your child? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, cause they don't speak English. So it makes it really hard to reason with them. It does. Don't worry about reasoning with your dogs. No, that just goes down, bad, bad paths there. Speaking of reason, artificial intelligence has a lot of it, potentially. Following up from last week's story about the Rosetta fold open source protein folding, protein folding predicting AI that was released, basically at the same time, Alpha Fold came out and made its source open to the public as well, so that people could peek behind the hood and see how it worked. Additionally, they published that they were predicting the structure of more than 20,000 human proteins in addition to almost all the known proteins from 20 model organisms, E. coli, fruit flies, yeast, soy, rice, a lot of organisms, mice, they're gonna add to this database that's going to be a publicly available, searchable database. It's a combined total of over 300,000 protein structure predictions. The company has released all this online. It's going to be held by the European Bioinformatics Institute based at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory. And as of last week, researchers were going into this database and searching for their proteins, biologists looking for the proteins that they study to see if the structure had been adequately predicted. Well, it's not that great. It increases us from our previous amount of 18% of the human genomes or the human proteomes of the human, yeah, 18% of the human proteome to about 40%. We now have pretty accurate structures, very accurate structures for about 40% of the human proteome. Now that's a lot, but that leaves a lot of proteins still up for grabs. And while I was snooping around on Twitter last week, I saw a lot of researchers posting images of the proteins that had been, the structures that had been predicted for their proteins and just shaking their heads and laughing and going, this is telling me nothing. This is totally wrong. And so a lot of researchers are still going to be waiting for their proteins to work. And the reason behind a lot of this is because there are a lot of proteins that they only get into their final confirmation when they interact with other molecules. So because we don't know what the other molecule is necessarily or we don't have that information involved in the artificial intelligence, the deep learning that would predict the structure, the end structure. There's no way to know what it would look like because the structure is going to be determined by some other forces, molecular forces. But that said, opens up our catalog of protein structures, massively adds to this ability for researchers to be able to link together structure and function and understand a lot more about us and the world we live in. And it's just the beginning. That's what's, it's just the beginning, which is so exciting. And then I think additionally a story that was, that's, yeah, yeah. I think that's all I want to say about this. Nevermind. Okay. That's all I want to say about this. So I'm thinking about all the things I wanted to say about it. But some of the other proteins that are not included in this catalog are also larger. So they're too big. And alpha folds set a cutoff for the size of the protein, the number of amino acids that would be included in the proteins. The bigger it is, the more crazy different ways it could fold. Yeah. Yeah, so researchers working on the big giant proteins, you're out of luck, but there are fewer of you. So, yeah. I know. I picked the wrong protein to research. It'll happen eventually. You'll get there. Don't give up, science. Don't give up. What do you have next, Justin? Bees on caffeine. Yeah, so there's been past studies that showed that bees like caffeine, you can, they will more frequently visit a caffeinated flower. Or one that is sort of treated with some caffeine. And these researchers thought, okay, that's interesting. They seem to like caffeine, but maybe this is just, this is something that's going on within the bee itself. Maybe they're just, they're showing up more to that flower because it's also more interesting or they can smell better. They maybe it's affecting the bee's memory of where that flower is. Isn't caffeine addictive? So... No, why would you say that? There's, I mean, there's a Starbucks on every other corner now, but that doesn't mean it's addictive. It just means it's really, really good. And you have to have it to start to say otherwise it is terrible. So they're just getting bees hooked is what's happening. Well... Hooked on caffeine. Well, I mean caffeine is supposed to enhance learning. It's supposed to be this drug that makes you more attentive to be at least more excited or excitable or caffeine. Well, and that's exactly right. I only have my normal two cups today, I promise. That's exactly the effect that they ended up discovering. So when you give bees caffeine, this is Sarah Arnold, who's a researcher at the Natural Resources Institute University of Greenwich in the UK. When you give bees caffeine, they don't do anything like fly in loops, but do seem to be more motivated and more efficient. We wanted to see if providing caffeine would help their brains create a positive association between a certain flower odor and a sugar reward. It's really quite challenging environment out there for bumblebees because they don't have extraordinarily sharp vision at long range, according to Arnold. They need to rely on a lot of cues such as their sense of smell to find good flowers. So instead of dosing flowers with caffeine, what they did was they went to the bee box, they went to the hive and they created a mixture of sugar caffeine and this scent of a, I think it's some kind of a strawberry flower, plant flower. Where is it at? Anyway, some sort of strawberry. And then they watched where the bees went and they had some trained bees, some untrained bees, they had all these groups and they went out and tested them. It turned out the 70.4% of the caffeinated bees visited the strawberry flowers first, which was much higher than chance. It was compared to 60% of the bees given just the strawberry odor and sugar, but without the caffeine. And it was almost 44.8% of the bees given only sugar flew to the strawberry flowers first. So the suggestion was the caffeine did give a noticeable edge to the bees ability to recognize strawberry flower from its odor and to remember the desired nectar. Now this died off pretty quickly because they still had the sugar was still back in the hive. So every time they went back, they still got sugar. And then they eventually like, I'll just go anywhere. Oh, I should just stay here. This is fine. I don't even need to go out now. But they think this could have, they could have an implication for training bee boxes for farmers. Farmers, there's not, I think there's some crazy number like 80% of the bees in America come to California for the pollination season. And so you see these bee boxes out there in the fields next to the orchard or the sunflowers or the strawberries or whatever is out there growing. But if they can, the farmers can then train their bees to prefer their crop and maybe give them a little caffeine so they'll be better workers. This is why every office should have a coffee maker. Every place of work should be providing free coffee. I know you're thinking- And allow coffee breaks. I know you're thinking, hey, I don't want to pay for coffee for all of my employees. But the thing is they'll be more efficient, enthusiastic and frankly just awake. I mean, farmers are gonna start giving it to bees for free. Well, you know, Justin, if you give a bee coffee, they're gonna ask for milk. And if you give a bee milk, they're gonna ask for sugar. And if you give a bee sugar, they're gonna ask for a scone. Yeah, and if you give a bee a scone, they're gonna ask for, should I keep going? No, that's okay. I'm fine, I'm fine. Bees can have all those things. What do you got against bees having scones? Honey, they have honey with scones. There you go. Perfect, full circle. I love it. We've known bees are very intelligent for a really long time. So it's interesting to see that a compound that is known to accentuate these engagement attention kind of learning behaviors in humans that it has a similar effect in an insect like a bee. So now, yeah, drink your caffeine and be busy as a bee. Get nice and buzzed. Mike Schumacher. That is the topic. The caffeine though. Mike Schumacher wins the puns. Bee Rista? Yeah. But Michael Pollan has a... I don't know, that one was... An audio book? All about caffeine. So this fits in here 100%. I'm sorry, Schumacher. I thought Bee Rista was a fabulous pun. Just want to be on the record. I mean, somebody also said Starbucks. So that's also very good. This is Starbucks. Starbucks is good too. All right, everybody. Copyright, I think that we could go with that one. I think that was good. I have news for everyone. Big, big, big, big news. Yes. The human genome has been sequenced. Again? Wait, what? Didn't we do this? That's so good. Was it just like, did we just do a rough draft the first time? Yeah, didn't it finish in the, I want to say late 90s we finished it, right? No, it was early 2000s. Oh, okay. 2013 was around 12, 13 was around when they announced the completion, but it had a whole bunch of holes in it. And then around about 2019, some researchers decided that they were not happy with the holes in the DNA. And it wasn't a lot. It was about 8% of the genome and computational biologist Johns Hopkins, Michael Schatz, says there's basically an entire human chromosome that had gone missing. So of course, researchers are like, what's in there? What's going on? And Adam Philippi, a computational biologist at the National Human Genome Research Institute, one of the researchers along with Karen Maiga, a geneticist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who founded the telomere to telomere consortium to fix this problem said, and this is from Carl Zimmer's article in The New York Times, that the motivation, part of the motivation for such an audacious project was that the missing gaps annoyed him. They were just really bugging me. You take a beautiful landscape puzzle, pull out a hundred pieces and look at it. That's very bothersome to a perfectionist. So because there were bothersome holes in the data for the DNA, for the human genome, these researchers pulled together not long ago, two years ago, to complete this. And they got around 99 scientists working to sequence what was left and actually sequence everything. They figured out new ways to make sense of the data, to figure out how overlaps were working and to just to work it through. So it's not just that they filled in the holes by just sequencing what was missing. They did sequence the whole genome and they put it together and they ended up finding about 2,000 genes that we didn't know of at all. A lot of them don't look like they work. They look like they have mutations, but there are about a hundred or so that might be able to produce proteins and we don't know what they make. Important. Yeah, and so now researchers are looking at this new data and they're starting to take, instead of matching up their patients' genomes to the old version of the human genome, they're now starting to match up their humans, their patients' mutations against this new data to see if there is anything new that comes of it that can help them treat diseases, that can help them understand where certain diseases that are genetically based come from. We should talk to the guy with the really big protein that he can't get into the alpha pole because he's been like, it's a human-made protein. They're like, no it isn't. It's not anywhere in the genome. He's like, but it has to, it's in the humans. They must have gotten it somewhere else. No, I'm telling you, it's humans now finally. He's like, aha, I've been telling you all for many years, nobody listened to me. Nobody listened. Yeah, they found some weirdness around the centromeres. The centromeres, that part of the chromosome, that kind of moves things around during cell division. It anchors proteins during that division process. And apparently there's a lot of repeated stuff in there, but there's a lot of DNA that they don't understand why it's there because it doesn't seem to be involved in the centromeres' key purpose. So there's a bunch of stuff that's kind of popping up that they didn't know that now they're getting a little bit more information. And so this is very interesting. So yeah, 2021, we have the entire human genome. Finally, finally, but yeah, it's pretty good. It's exciting. I mean, maybe someday we'll actually know what to do with it and how to interpret it. That's the next step. This is This Week in Science. Thank you for joining us for another episode of Science News and Discussion. If you enjoy the show, sharing it with your children, sharing it with your family. Yeah, you can share it with your friends too. Tell them about Twist Today. All right, I only have a couple of COVID stories this week. They're not good. They can't be good. Nope, I just want to follow up on the CDC's reassessment and the fact that they really are saying, And yes, if you're vaccinated and you're in an area of high viral spread, then it would be safer for you. They're recommending that you wear a mask in public places, indoors, where there are other people. The Delta variant is about a thousand times stronger than the previous variant. There are calculations that have been made that of course are being contested because it's not exact, but the CDC had said you could spend about 15 minutes, if you're unvaccinated, wearing a mask indoors with another person who was wearing a mask indoors. That was because of the amount of viral particles that are released during breathing and how many particles it seemed to take to cause an infection. They said about 15 minutes and you'll get infected. Based on the fact that the Delta is about a thousand times stronger, that now comes down to about one second. You can spend very little time with somebody and still get infected because there are so many. There are a thousand times more transmissive particles being released with the Delta variant. That's why it is more transmissible. There's just more of it. It's why more people are catching it. It's why more people are transmitting it because it gets in. It's just making lots and lots of viral babies inside your nose. We don't like that. Wear a mask indoors again. Again please. And encourage your friends and family to be vaccinated. Please. Please. Yes. And apparently there are people who have been suggesting that you don't need to get vaccinated. You can use ivermectin, which is an antiparasitic drug that is used very well, very often for getting rid of parasites. It had never been used against COVID before. But there was some people said, well it works here and there was a little bit of data and so individuals because it's a very inexpensive drug, people have been pushing for the use of ivermectin as a treatment for COVID-19. The Cochrane Collective, they review ideas. They go and they review all the literature and they do these amazing reviews and people look to them in the field, what did Cochrane say? They did the review. The Cochrane Review has come to the conclusion that based on the data, laboratory tests suggested a weak effect on SARS-CoV-2 virus in a test tube, but did not seem feasible in humans as the doses needed would be large. However, early small trials suggested large effects on mortality and this has led to some advocacy groups lobbying for its widespread introduction worldwide. And in the published paper, the researchers go on to say, the co-coordinating editor, Professor Paul Gardner, went on to say that this is a great review from an experienced team. The hype around ivermectin is driven by some studies where the effect size for ivermectin is frankly not credible and this has driven the conclusions in other reviews. The study with a huge effect has been retracted as fake. Medical appraisal is the cornerstone of Cochrane's work and with such extreme public demands for a drug to work during the pandemic, it remains vital that we hold on to our scientific principles to guide care. And so the main authors went on to say that current evidence does not support using ivermectin for treating or preventing of COVID-19 unless they are part of well-designed randomized trials. And there are none of those trials here in the United States. Oxford is going to be starting to use ivermectin in part of one of their trials and I believe there are a couple of other ongoing trials as well. But for right now, don't try and rush things that you do not know, Jon Snow. This, my mouth is very small. I know I'm washing your mouth. If the listening audience could see what has happened. I know this is very small because I'm very angry because people would rather catch COVID and use experimental medicine than take a vaccine that has been widely tested. It's very frustrating to me. It's just business. I mean, they don't have a touch. They don't get a touch of the vaccine money, but they got all kinds of sideways cures that they got the stakes in that they get a nice touch. Yeah. Hey, I got a suggestion before we do global pandemic times two and need a new vaccine. Can we go back to my first suggestion? Oh, a year and a half ago and just take eight weeks off. I really could use vacation. Everybody. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Take eight weeks off. It would be ideal. Yeah. Everyone's stuck up. Everybody. Otherwise, guess what? It never ends. Yeah. No. In fact, it gets worse again. Yeah. Yeah. I don't want to do Christmas over Zoom again. No. Actually, that part was fine. Christmas and all that and everything else. I don't really want it. I don't. I no longer want to hang out with people. This is what I've learned from the pandemic is that, you know what, turns out when I don't interact with you all in person, it's fine. It's just fine. I'm kind of okay with it too. I would like to go more places though. I am getting. I will go on record as being not okay with it. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Eight weeks. I would like to hire a babysitter again. We'll call it for like two months from now. Everybody's stuck up. We don't need two months. We'll do it in a month. Next month, everybody stuck up for this month, buy the things, all the toilet paper that you need for eight weeks, not eight months, eight weeks of toilet paper, buy all the stuff, put it, gather it. We're going to have a moratorium on rent. We're going to have the unemployment things going on every, just know what we need. And then we can just like start everything over, but this is after show ideas. Start the road though. It's got to be on the show otherwise they don't hear it though. I know. I know all of the amazing ideas. Y'all know that this show only happens because of you. This is This Week in Science. Thank you for being here and being with us for this episode. We hope that you're here next episode and we hope that you were here the last episode. We hope that you stick with us. And if you would like to help support twists, head over to twist.org, click on the Patreon link, and then join our Patreon community and choose your level of support, $10 and up, and you will get a thank you by name at the end of the show. And there are some fun little gifts that get sent to you as well. We really can't do this without you. Thank you for your support. All right, we're going to come back right now to a little part of the show that's called Blair's Animal Corner. With Blair. Why do I always turn the volume down? What you got Blair? I'm going to let you pick Justin. You want pterosaurs or do you want baboons and fish? Okay, great. You got it. So this is a study looking at baby pterosaurs. Researchers from the University of Portsmouth and the University of Bristol, along with paleontologist Darren Nash, found something about baby pterosaurs. So we haven't really found the science in general, I'll say, has not found a lot of baby pterosaurs, a lot of pterosaur eggs, newly hatched pterosaurs. These things have not been recovered in fossils very much. And so this is something that is more of a recent discovery. The first fossils of pterosaur embryos were discovered in 2004, but they've known about pterosaurs for over two centuries. So all that to say, exactly the biology of a baby pterosaur, how they come out of the egg has been a bit of a mystery to this point. For those of you that don't know, pterosaurs lived during the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous. That's about 228 million years ago to 66 million years ago. They were around for a long time. And so there was this question of what baby pterosaurs looked like and if they were capable of flight. Because if you think about birds, for example, they spent a pretty long time like wet, gooey and then fluffy and just completely helpless. It takes them many days, two weeks, depending on the species, to be able to fly. So there's this question of, do they come out helpless? It's called altricial. Or do they come out precocial? Like a baby cow or a baby giraffe that's like up and running around in an hour, right? So this question was actually answered via fossils. And so they were able to look at humorous bones of these babies and they found that they were stronger. Yes, the funny bones. They were stronger than that of many adults. So they were strong enough for flight. So then they used computers to model the flying abilities of hatchlings and they used previously obtained wing measurements from established hatchlings. So these are like juvenile pterosaurs. Then they had the embryos and then they had the adults. And all of this compared together found that the, as I mentioned, strength of the humorous bone was more. It was enough that they feel very confident that they could fly. But that they were fly very differently than adults. So these tiny newborn little hatched pterosaurs were about 25 centimeters long. So that's like under a foot. It's a very, it could fit in the palm of your hand, spill out a little bit, but pretty much could fit in the palm of your hand. And they could, they were strong enough based on this computer modeling to sustain flapping and takeoff, which is pretty stressful on a body. And they were shaped and powered for, for kind of flapping flight instead of gliding flight. And so adults do more gliding flight. So they think that parents, the adults were slower. And the younger, oh, sorry, I got that backwards. So the hatchlings were smaller or were slower because they're, they're smaller. So they just get less power, excuse me, but they were more maneuverable. So the adults being these big gliders, like a hang glider, it takes forever to be able to turn, right? So they, they're faster, but they're less maneuverable. So the question is, is this just the way they come out and the fact that they're smaller and they, you know, their muscles, I don't know, maybe they're not developed the same or there could be all sorts of reasons that they fly this way. Or is this actually the result of evolution? And then this enable them to rapidly escape predators because they're so tiny and they're easily preyed upon. So then that leads to other crazy questions we can never really find out, which is, were they independent from their parents? Because if they were, they would need to be more agile because they weren't being protected. Did, did flight style influence habitat choices? Did they separate from the egg and the parents and go into a different type of habitat or a different niche because they flew differently? Did this change as they grew? So there's all sorts of potential kind of further conclusions you could draw from this research. And so obviously, you can never just observe a pterosaur and figure this out, but you have to kind of piece it together with other clues from the fossil record. Well, the thing that makes me wonder, right, is then is, did the adults continue to be able to fly? Like, did the adults grow to such a size where they're just like, it doesn't even make sense for them to fly, but it's such an advantage for the children to be able to be small and get up into the air away from predators because the parents are pretty decent size. They're like, it's even hard to imagine a pterosaur flying. Like it's just like, it's almost like that can't be a thing that ever existed big. Maybe they didn't fly. Maybe they just came back, you know, that's just a juvenile thing all the flying. I think they'd get eaten real quick because they'd be really clumsy on the ground. They'd be, they'd be luched real fast. They have an almost quadrupedal ability to maneuver on the ground. Yeah, I doubt they're very quick, but they would run into that anytime they were on the ground. I don't know. And for those of you listening, the chat room is telling me that I should have made very clear. I'm talking about pterosaurs. You just blew up your mic too with the hard beat. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Pterosaurs. I got my, I got my shield up. It's my fault actually, because I was like, oh, it's a cute little dinosaur and they're not dinosaurs. I mean, it's anyway, they're, it's with the P in the front, like pterodactyls, but there's a whole family of flying dinosaurs. You should have caught on by now. I was talking about flying dinosaurs, right? Like, I feel like that. They weren't flying dinosaurs. They're not, they are and they are. It's kind of like saying a spider is not a bug. Okay. It's like saying a curious stretch is a monkey. It's not a monkey. It's like, no, that's different. That's the same thing. No, you're right actually. You're actually totally right about that. It just hurts my heart so much more. Anyway, so that's the pterosaurs. Moving up. Yeah. Let's talk about baboons and Fitbits. So this is a study from Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior. And they put what is basically Fitbits accelerometers on an entire troop of baboons, about 25 baboons. And they wanted to see the detailed movement and behavior and related energetic costs of a troop. This is because baboons live in stable societies of up to 150 individuals. They can be as big as 30 kilograms, which I'll let you guys do that math. I can't do that in my head. I can do some of the others. Justin. So 30 kilograms is approximately the same as 30,000 grams. Very good. Yes. And it's also, I did a quick Google while you were doing that. Thank you very much for the vamp. That is 66 pounds. So anyway, they can be as big as 66 pounds. They can be little babies. So all that to say, they have this mixed age group. And as you imagine, this is directly related to our last story, that 66 pound baboon and a baby can move at different speeds. So they wanted to see the dynamics of the speed and pace and energetic output of the individuals in this troop. How do you move as a troop of 25 or potentially up to 150 when you have this wide range? Do you all slow down to the slowest? Is there kind of a push to get to a middle ground? Is everyone following the dominant male? What is happening there? And so by being able to strap these accelerometers to all of the baboons, they could figure out the energetic cost and the speed and the relative location of all these guys. They actually studied this baboon troop since 2012. The senior author Meg Crowfoot has been studying them for almost a decade. And so they came up with about 10 million points of data showing where the animals moved. And the accelerometer had 120 million readings giving ultra high resolution information on movement behavior. That's like speed and the number of steps. So while the sample size in terms of individuals was not large, the actual number of data points over almost 10 years is very large. So there is something that you can draw from this and kind of get a nice average, at least for this particular troop of baboons. And they found that the animals do in fact have a preferred speed of movement depending on their body size. So a large male with longer legs will obviously move with longer strides. That nice pendulum motion require future steps to get farther. So they like to go faster. Juveniles have smaller legs. They move slower. Anyone who's tried to walk hand in hand with a small child knows this. So knowing all that and being able to come up with their preferred speed based on energy output at speed and things like that, they then looked at how fast the troop actually went. And it looks like all baboons compromised so that they could match the pace of their nearest neighbors. This sounds to me almost like a school of fish, which seems very cool kind of population dynamics. There's all sorts of interesting stuff happening there. But when the group spreads apart, they try even closer. So when they span farther distance as a troop of 25, they kind of jog to catch up with those around them even more. And so this provides evidence of what they consider a democratic process at work, but really I think it's more just kind of mechanics of a group in movement. And so they specifically wanted to see what the dominant male was up to, because in one-on-one interactions, dominant males definitely have the ultimate say so. But in collective movement, they actively slow down to stay with the rest of the group. And it looks like the individuals that sacrifice the most in the group are the smallest ones. So the smallest baboons. Because they have to keep up, right? They have to work so hard. Yeah. So they have to keep up to get with the rest of the group. They have to travel longer than they wanted to go, and they put out more energy. They pay a disproportionate cost to stay with the group cohesion. So the researchers say this might be because they have the most to gain from group membership, which totally makes sense. But I also think the youngins can handle more physical stress, and that might also have something to do with it. It builds character. It builds character. Even if you're a baboon. I will say, though, yes, you have the youngins with all the energy. They can keep up. That's great. But they also tire out, and then they whine, and then they end up dragging on you, and you have to carry them. Yeah, but then they also recover the next day, like it never happened. Whereas you are still tired from the long walk and the playground and the thing. But as a vertically challenged person, slightly, I'm not as tall as some of the other people I know going walking with, I have always had to, my legs, they're shorter. I've always had to move them two strides for other people's one. Now did you keep up with those people, Kiki, because you are worried about being predated upon? I, it depends. I was going to say no, but then I thought about places where I'd been. Well, actually, that depends. Yeah, walking home late at night is a whole different story. But anyway. There's some neighborhoods, yeah. Yeah. So the last bit of the study, which I think is interesting, is they use computer simulations to see how the group would look if everyone moved at their preferred pace, what would happen to this kind of dynamic, this flow of the group. And then they compared with individuals adjusting their speed in response to others. And they, they really showed, to no one's surprise, I'm sure, but the science has to be done, right? That the locomotor compromise is a requirement for cohesion, which just means somebody's got to speed up and somebody's got to slow down if everybody's going to stay together. Yep. You have to come to some kind of agreed upon middle. And it has to be, it can't, yeah. At some point, I'm sure if there is a predator and one of the large males or the sentries sees that male and is like, oh, sees the predator and is like, everyone get together and go faster than everybody runs faster together. But it's all about protecting as many of the group as possible. Yeah. And so last, last thing I'll mention is about kind of next steps of this study, the implications, which I think is, is an important thing to mention here. So the differing locomotor ability, the different speed at which animals can move, might put an upper limit on how large a group can be, might force specific individuals to group together, and might have impacts on the structure of animal societies. So to this point, there's not been a lot of fit bits on animals in the wild. This is one of the first studies where they've really done this thoroughly. And so being able to study this aspect of cohesion of a group or a troop or a pod or a pride or whatever you want to call it, could have important implications in the future when you're studying the kind of population dynamics and ecology and all these sorts of things. And self-driving cars. Yes, and that. Somebody's got to slow down. Somebody's got to speed up. Everyone's got to stay together. You're going to create traffic. Yeah. You're going to get traffic without a jam. This is This Week in Science. Thank you for all those animal stories, Blair. It is time to turn now to Justin's Science Corner. Justin, what you got? I've got an international team of scientists. In your back pocket. Yeah, I locked in the basement. No. International team of scientists has found that changes to human oral biome during the shift from foraging to farming were not nearly as dramatic as those who have occurred in modern times due to antibiotics. This is they looked at 10,000 years of history basically from around the Neolithic up to the end of the Stone Age, or at the end of the Stone Age, up to medieval times. And they etched out mineralized plaque, dental calculus. And the DNA checks on it and they could tell basically what the biome of the mouth was. Interestingly, they were actually even able to track certain species of bacteria's emergence or sort of taking over or being eliminated from the mouth over time. But really the changes were pretty minor until we get to the modern age and we have antibiotic use and maybe the toothbrush starts getting used more frequently, toothpaste, that sort of thing. And now there's some antibiotic resistance in microbes and there's much more significant evolutionary changes taking place within the bacteria of our mouths in the modern age. So this is going to be 22nd century problems. So we don't, I don't think we have to worry about runaway antibiotic resistant mouth microbes yet, but it may be coming. And then here's the one I'm going to end my segments this week with some terrible awful news that has no silver lining and should give listeners a knot in their stomach as they realize that a living nightmare from which they cannot wake up is going to be the new normal. And it has nothing to do with antibiotic resistance in your mouth. Nope. Again, that's going to be 22nd century problems. If we get there, for those who get there, this is the global approach to climate change has so far been say you're going to fight it, make some bold policy change suggestions, stick to a few of the easier to reach goals, congratulate yourself for trying. Meanwhile, according to IPCC researchers, Earth's vital signs have continued to deteriorate. Researchers, part of a group of more than 14,000 scientists who have also signed on to an initiative declaring a worldwide climate emergency said that governments have consistently failed to address the root cause of climate change, which is the over exploitation of Earth. Since a similar assessment in 2019, they noted an unprecedented surge in climate related disasters, floods in South America and Southeast Asia, record shattering heat waves and wildfires in Australia, United States, and devastating cyclones in Africa and South Asia. They apparently put this together before the unprecedented flooding in Europe, but that will be next year's report, no doubt alongside something even worse that we didn't even realize was going to happen, which is also going to be new normal. Of 31 vital signs that they were tracking, key metrics of planetary health include things like greenhouse gas emissions, glacier thicknesses, CI extent before station levels, that sort of thing. They found that 18 of those 31 hit record extremes for the first time in this past year. For example, despite the dip in pollution, thanks to the pandemic of 2020 and 2021, levels of atmospheric CO2 and methane are at all-time highs in 2021. Greenland and Antarctica, both routinely showed all-time low levels of ice mass. Glaciers are melting 31% faster than they did just 15 years ago. Ocean heat and global sea levels set new records since 2019, and the annual loss rate of the Brazilian Amazon reached a 12-year high in 2020. Things are so bad in parts of the Amazon that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found forest degradation linked to fire, drought, and logging are causing parts of the Brazilian Amazon to now act as sources of carbon rather than removers of the gas from the atmosphere. Livestock, such as cows and sheep, are now at record levels, with a mass exceeding that of all humans and all wild land animals combined. We're now a planet of domestic food animals. If you came from another planet and looked at what's the predominant earthling, it's domestic livestock. Recent record-breaking heat waves in the Western United States and Canada suggest there's mounting evidence that we are nearing or have already crossed a number of climate tipping points from which the idea is there is no return. These include melting the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, which may now be irreversible on a centuries-long time scale, regardless of how or if humankind slashes its emissions. There is increasing ocean deoxygenation and warming waters threatening warm water coral reefs, upon which half a billion people rely on for food, income and storm protection, let alone the oxygen produced to the planet you can breathe. Given these alarming developments, this is, say, the authors of this day published in the journal Bioscience, given these alarming developments, we need short, frequent, and easily accessible updates on the climate emergency. The authors echoed previous calls for a transformative change within six years, eliminating fossil fuels, slashing pollutants, restoring ecosystems, switching to plant-based diets, moving away from indefinite growth models, and stabilizing the human population. If that last sentence, stabilizing human population, does not give your spine chills, you might not have a spine. That is, that's saying there's, we're breaking the planet to where it can't sustain any more people. Stop having children. Maybe we could do a silent green thing instead of all these cows. They've also called for climate change education to be included in school core curriculums globally in order to raise awareness. Again, awareness is one of those things that even those that in the United States were 72% according to that Yale poll believe that global warming is happening? They also only hear about it maybe once a week from the media, even though this is an impending crisis causing all sorts of problems. I think that's really important. You just said though, because, we've been saying over and over every week on the show, tell your friends and family to get vaccinated, tell your friends and family to get vaccinated, that has replaced the usual echo that we talk about, which is talk to your friends and family about climate change. Because there is, there's an expectation that you're hearing about it enough. We don't need to talk about that right now. It's the kind of statistic that proves that you need to talk to your friends and family about climate change. Because if they're not hearing about it from the media, they need to hear about it from you. And believe it or not, there is a push-pull there. And if everybody starts talking about it and is looking for that information, the media will talk about it. Why is everyone reporting 10 different ways on the same COVID story every day? Because people want to hear about it. If we can make it where people... It's impacting their lives right now. We can make it feel urgent and real and solvable. Which again, COVID is by the way, even though it's whatever. And so is climate change. Climate change is solvable as well. And I think that is the... People want to learn about it. People want to learn about that. But we also need to inform people. People need to be informed that that change... It can come from them, but they also have to demand it of corporations, corporations, manufacturers, politicians. The entire system needs to change. Maybe it is a big big ask to do it in six years. But there's a lot of political will that has to be addressed there. So again, the political will is of a slight majority of investors. Money is make-believe anyway. You want to get something done? It is. It's make-believe how to get people to do things. Yes, I know. It's why everything is done at all right now. Politics is driven by money. Greed and money. So if we just get people to give them the money to do the good things, why can't we do that? Fake meat alternatives all of a sudden is like a $10 billion business. And it's because someone realized hey, I can actually make this taste not like rubber. You know how they did that? They did that with science. With science. But there's exactly, so now there's this big push. And that's exactly what we need is we need people demanding things so that then the people who have the unjust, undue power can do it. And like you said, it's a well-known problem for humanity that we have a hard time connecting with things that are not affecting us right here and right now. I'm going to put it off. I don't have to think about that right now. I'm not going to worry about packing until the night before I leave. Morning of. Exactly. The state, the U.S. territory at least, state and the most danger from global warming and is feeling its effects probably the strongest is the state that keeps electing people who don't believe or deny it publicly the global warming of science behind climate change. So that's Florida. So there's this other reverse tipping point I think for at least for this country which is when the water is high enough that Florida is underwater and no longer can sustain a population we then can move forward. We'll see, we'll see how that works. But that's not going to happen in six years. So let's move forward. If you live near a coast you're much more likely to believe the climate science, which is an interesting thing, which is also that's where most populations, that's why numbers are there. Yep, yep, yep, yep. This is this weekend science that was, I mean reality sometimes is hard, right? But we have to face it and we're glad we're facing it together. Let's face the science, let's face understanding what the world is really like and move forward. And you know sometimes the world brings us very interesting science that can distract us a little bit in a moment from some of those depressing real world thoughts. Like do you ever think about what happens when you move your head from side to side really fast and you're looking for things there's this idea in neuroscience that like if you're moving your head really fast or there's something in motion as you're moving your head that basically your eyes are taking little snapshots and then piecing them together that there are these little breaks in the actual pictures that the eye is taking. That's not true. It's not true. I've never heard of that so good. And it's actually, there is your eyes like smearing the light. And that is according to a new study out this week in Science Advances magazine. According to their abstract or the abstract of the article about it the infocus about which is great. This is a vision story in a section of the magazine called focus which I find very punny. Visual information is continuously sampled from our environment even as the eyes move which helps the visual system create a stable view of the world. So when you're moving your eye it's smearing things it's taking a constant picture and those streaks across the visual field actually help the brain to create a continuous and stable view of the world that doesn't break up and break apart. And so we're able to be perceptive and be aware of the motion of objects in our field in addition to the movement of our eyes. But I find it very interesting that we used to think that there were these, well our eyes do these saccade motions when you move your eyes really fast especially like if you're sitting in a chair and you get spun around in the chair your eyes don't just track with your head forward and back these saccades and so because of those saccades they didn't think that we got that consistent continuous motion but this new study by Schweitzer and Rolfs demonstrates that the motion streaks help the ocular motor system correct for variability in eye movements and help to build that stable view of the world. So even though the saccades are there they're not really there in the way that our brain interprets it because the light never changes. Our eye is continuously taking that picture. So they used a novel high speed projector and they manipulated a visual scene during eye movements. They had the eyes moving and the visual but the visual scene also changed and participants saw six small patches with unique patterns one of the patches was designated for the eye movement. You're supposed to try and focus on the target and the pattern ensured the patch would generate a unique motion streak and then they wanted to know whether the participants were unconsciously processing the motion streaks so they rapidly shifted the position of the target while the participants eyes were in motion and as a result the eyes landed on a location between the actual target and one of the other patches because the eyes were like wait a minute that moved the eyes didn't quite go where they were supposed to and so once the movement was complete all the patches were masked so that there was really no difference between any of them and so there were corrective eye movements that had to be made by the eyes but all of these things together the end story for this is what I told you at the beginning our eyes are taking a continuous picture of the world I love it and they're streaky and scary yeah I guess you would assume based on how the eye moves that it's like pasting a bunch of overlapping photos together but it's really like taking a pano yeah yes so something is like if you watch ballerinas doing like their spins they're picking a spot and then they're focusing on the spot and then it's time to come back to sort of stabilize that's how they don't barf right right no no I get it too it totally makes sense but then like everyone's like the winter Olympics will happen and then the ice skaters are doing that like like blurry spin where they like sort of just disappear into this hub of a spinning top how in the world do they do that because that right there that seems like that would be just so utterly disorienting number one but it's also so they don't just know how yeah you know but the way that it's set up though because the eyes are not kind of going back and forth and taking these individual shots if you would imagine if they were taking the individual saccade type shots the ballerina would have a much harder tying being able to find that target at the others you know when she came back around 360 degrees because that the pictures being pasted together by the brain wouldn't make sense it wouldn't make sense it would be hard for the brain to make out like where should things be and am I in the right place and is this the right thing but it's specifically because of the streakiness that streak goes around and so you you still have a streak that continues from that target from where you started to where you're ending so your brain is like there's this line of continuance and I've been following it so that's how it helps with the stability that might be true now what I want to do is I want to blindfold some ballerinas yes and set them spinning on a stage and see how much of it is vision how much of it is just like physical body memory if I do this I do that and then I should be looking in the right direction again like how much is it visual cue how much of it is just within the body it's all well ocular motor it all goes together just put a lot of pillows on the floor so nobody gets hurt yeah lots of pillows and my very last study for the night is about little baby dreamy mice little dreamy baby mice a little baby mouse yeah so this is maybe different with the way that human babies work and our eyes work because our eyes don't work for several months after we're born like our eyes really they're not ready to be there but a lot of newborn mammals open their eyes right after they're born and has to start making visual sense of the world because predators are around a lot of precocious animals really have to do it very quickly but these researchers publishing in science out of Yale University this week suggest that there's a kind of activity in the retina of the eyes of little baby mammals and they did this study using mice that is like dreaming about the world that they will live in yes so before they're born these little mice have waves of activity from the neonatal retina this is before the eyes have ever opened before they've come out of the womb they're still in there waiting to be born and they have these waves of activation and these waves of activation mimic actual light stimulated activity that would occur if the animal were moving forward through its environment but how could this be how could this be this dream like eye activity is this something that's being provided somehow is this something that was happenstance and gave an evolutionary advantage this seems insane right it's practice it's practice it's like the ballerinas but it's before practice it's practice but this is the interesting aspect it's and I want to know this is so this is in mice I'd love to know if this is something that happens in neonatal humans as well but and I'd love to know if there's a different stage of development at which this is present in different species depending upon their precociousness so which species of mammals this activation this preparing for use and when does it occur how early does it occur but again how like what what is the mechanism this is killing me you're so confused I don't I don't know but this is this this I mean this is a huge question right the why is so that the animals more prepared to view things in the world and to survive getting it ready for how it's going to be how does it how does it know that the eye is going to need to have these kinds of signals in it to move through the environment this must be evolutionary evolutionary evolved but yeah is it a genetic memory is because we know the mom can kind of provides it weird memory based biology to the baby I don't know so remember it seems like we always seem to have this sort of boxed disconnected idea that the unborn child is removed from all life it's like an alien showing up on planet earth for the first time I don't even know how I know how to breathe what am I doing here what is but they are part of a billion year old life form that has been surviving on this planet we can we pod off we butt off into these separate individuals that are so different from each other and think we're unique but ultimately we're all the same organism that's just sort of mutated off into different directions and had a billion years of of maneuvering on the planet so somewhere within all of that information of existing on the planet the eyes know what it's going to be facing in the brain as well and so this this is part of it which is the brain before animals are born already has started firing and wiring and starting to put things together and so this is probably part of that process of the the amicron cells within the retina firing and trying to wire with the brain it's probably setting up those neural circuits for success and what makes me say that is that the Yale team also removed or stopped they blocked the function of these amicron cells in the retina and so the flow of activation did not happen in those baby mice and it impaired the development of the the ability of these mice to respond to visual motion when they after they were born so you said endocrine yes amicron oh amicron but that's still a hormone related system crin yes so it's related but it yes but it's so I this is my my new hypothesis based on very little hold on hold on go ahead and and see what an amicron is in a human because they name the hormones different things even when they do the same it's not hormone it may because of the compounds that it releases maybe it has the eye any ending but these are inter interneurons okay in the red retina so they connect okay my question is our cells are the embryos dreaming when the mom is dreaming I don't know because this is now my follow-up right is like is there some sort of signal getting pushed to that being hmm to promote that yeah or is it separate yeah curious just but to some great degree to that is the same being right which is why it might be related yeah well they are related they are but is it anyway I don't know it's the mystery of life the what a miracle? miracle of life mystery of life you'll have mystery mystery of mysteries mystery of mysteries yeah but it's really you're some Mario Lanza you're belting out there but the the take-home message from this is that the brain the organism the baby is dreaming about being born is preparing to be born I don't wanna go out there no it's getting ready it's like yes let's go I'm gonna know how to see I'm gonna do all this stuff I'm practicing I'm practicing I'm gonna see the bright lights bright lights big city no no I was more way more comfortable in the womb yeah I was way better yeah try again tomorrow have we gotten to the end of another episode? I think we have we did it we've gotten through the science we didn't talk about the very old sponges maybe you out there oh yeah 850 million billion year old sponges yeah like the oldest sponge life ever discovered and it's in Canada early animal yet found at the top of a mountain 890 million years old you know rocks yes not billion million yes old life all on earth by more than 300 million years and really they're just looking at these little structures these little kind of what look like could have been filaments in rocks there's like specules yes amazing I pictured it like a sponge imprint on a stone yeah it's like a sponge imprint but it's yeah but it's the grippy feet was it the yellow side or the scratchy green side that's really the question neither Blair alright now we're really done we've really done it now thank you for being here for the show we hope you enjoyed it thank you too for your help with show notes and social media you're helping with those YouTube trolls tonight gord are in lore hot rod so many others I know I'm going to miss someone our moderators over on twitch and on YouTube other places thank you for modding identity for thank you for recording the show Rachel thank you for your assistance and the editing and I do want to say thank you to our Patreon sponsors I need to change screens when when one moment I had it all set up but then it didn't follow me so I'm sharing it now thank you too Pierre Valazar but Ralph Eve Figueroa John Ratnaswamy Carol Kornfeld whoa Kira Carl Kornfeld Jen Myronik Melanie Stagman DeKramsta Karentazi Woody M.S. Chris Wozniak Dave Bunvig Hal Snyder Donathan Styles A.K.A Don Stilo John Lee Ali Coffin Matty Parangorev Sharma Shubhru Don Munda Steven Albrand Darryl Myshak Stu Paulik Andrew Swanson Fred S.104 Skyloot Paul Ronovich Ked Reardon Noodles Jack Brian Carrington Matt Bass Joshua Fury Seananina Lamb John McKeed Greg Riley Mark Hessinflogue Jean Tellier Steve Leesman A.K.A Zima Ken Hayes Howard Tan Christopher Wrapp and Dana Pearson Richard Brendan Manish Dahlsback Flying Out Christopher Dreyer Artyom Greg Briggs John Atwood This profile name is hilarious in the context of some other podcasts Rudy Garcia Dave Wilkinson Rodney Lewis Paul Mallory Sutter Phillip Shane Kurt Larson Mountain Sloth Jim Drapeau Sarah Chavez Sue Doster Jason Oldes Dave Neighbor Eric Knapp E.O. Kevin Parachan Aaron Luthan Steve DeBell Bob Calder Marjorie Paul Disney Patrick Pecoraro Tony Steele Ulysses Adkins Brian Condren and Jason Roberts All of your support on Patreon. And if you would like to support us on Patreon, please head over to twist.org and click the Patreon link on next week's show. We will be back broadcasting from our YouTube and Facebook channels and from twist.org slash live. Hey, do you want to listen to us as a podcast? Whoa, I'm going to do that again. You can't. It's a live show. There's no doing it again. You're still doing it. Hey, do you want to listen to us as a podcast? Just search for this week in Science wherever podcasts are found. If you enjoyed the show, you can get your friends to subscribe as well. Yes, and for more information on anything you've heard here, today, show notes and links to stories will be available on our website, www.twist.org and you can sign up for a newsletter. You surely can. You can also contact us directly. email kirsten at kirsten at this week in Science.com Justin at twistminion at gmail.com and Blair at Blair Baz at twist.org. That's lots of ads. Just put twist T-W-I-S in the subject line or your email will be spam filtered into the Sponjo Seal of an 890-year-old Sponge. If there wasn't enough ads for you in the previous segment there, you can also reach out to us where we are at twist science, at Dr. Kiki, at Jacksonfly and at Blair's Menagerie. We love your feedback if there's a topic you would like us to cover or address. A suggestion for an interview, a haiku that comes to you in the night, please let us know. We'll be back here next week and we hope you'll join us again for more great science news. And if you've learned anything from the show, remember... to fill in your head. Little Costume is a couple of grand! 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 of it. This weekend science. This weekend science. Science. This weekend science. This weekend science. This weekend science. I've got one disclaimer. 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 suppose it's this week in science This week in science This week in science Science This week in science This week in science This week in science 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 of coming your way You better just listen to what we say And it's all in your head This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science Yes Yes Yes I think I am too I don't know what it was The heat today It being tired I don't know Doing statistics before the show I don't know I don't know Yeah I know statistics always makes me punchy Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Shake my head after all the statistics. Yes, are in lore. Blair's hyperness is the zoomies. The human zoomies. The human zoomies. Our cats do that every night. There's some point at which the zoomies happen. They run around the house. They run from one end of the house to the other end of the house. They run down the stairs. The ridding your house of spirits. I hope so. Yes, I would like to go to the snack bar. Actually, I had dinner. I'm fine. Yes. Seven cats. Oh, that's fantastic. Are in lore. We made it through a show even with the zoomies. I mean, zoomies. It makes the show go faster for me. Funny to have Justin not quite on the zoomie level, which is probably a good thing. What do you mean not on the zoomie level? What do you talk about? We decided the chat room decided that that Blair had the zoomies tonight. Like there she goes. She gots the zoomies. That's what I was saying. I was like, it's really funny. Justin was like the one of us who wasn't in the zoomies tonight. And I said that was probably a good thing. It's always good to have at least one person. One stable voice of reason to guide us across the waters of the science news. Yeah, like Carl Sagan. He had a very soothing voice. You know who I still like? So Carl Sagan is a great, like if you're looking for a sleep aid. He cultivated that voice. If you're looking for a sleep aid, forget like the waves and the stuff like put on Carl Sagan talking about space and things. But you know who else I really like? And it's really unfortunate because I absolutely love his content as well. Leonard Susskind. Go find a Leonard Susskind. He has just this cadence in this voice. Like I love listening to it. And then you fall asleep like you're thinking about Einstein equation stuff and you're asleep. He's amazing. I couldn't take one of his classes. I think he's got two soothing reassuring of a voice. You're like, oh, it's wonderful. These black girls, they are great. Good night, Fada. Thank you very much for the hit in the YouTube and helping when it was needed. That is your quick response was much appreciated. I didn't see what was going on until I was like, what is Blair talking about and what's happening? And then I saw something hit the chat room and I was like, ah, pretty unacceptable. I kind of feel like it was really unacceptable. I understand why they allow swears in YouTube chat, but I feel like hate speech should not be allowed. I feel like that should automatically be flagged and pulled. Yeah. I don't know. I feel slightly I feel slightly reassured by it. It's always a good sign when out of the ether of the people who could be targeted by like Nazi hate speech that they chose you. It makes you feel like I'm really I'm really doing I'm on the right side of the universe when which would be the left side. It's kind of but it's always a little bit reassuring to know that the people who are the wrongest people in society chose to target you. It's just just just just just confirms that you're doing everything fine. There's nothing wrong with you. That's nice that you can say that and that it doesn't cause trauma for you to see those things. Yeah. But there you know that is the problem right is that you know it's a it can be offensive and not be triggering or traumatizing but to other people those words are extremely traumatizing to me. It just looks like like it's a lot just when some people it's it's much worse. Yeah. But to me it always speaks loudest of the person who's using the language for sure. But it's just disruptive. I mean the it was incredibly disruptive. And I'm glad we have buttons and levers and mechanisms to remove these sorts of things. That's fantastic. Oh yes. But I don't I don't know. There's there's it's always showing that the level of stupid that's opposing you in this world is that is that utterly bankrupt mentally. Then this really shouldn't be a challenge out there. I don't know. From my corner I kind of feel like one thing I think Germany did right was outlawing the swatztika. I think it was a good move. Not allowed. Sorry. Wait say this again. Yeah. Post World War two. You're not allowed to wear display or show a swatztika in Germany. I said in Germany and I think that I mean did we actually technically ever stop being at war with Nazis or was it like a separate German like the country Germany surrender but the Nazi part like I don't know. I like I was a little bit of heat for saying this but the whole like you know punch all punch all Nazis kind of going forward like don't don't like it's nothing wrong with it. If anyone is trying to grab onto that ideology or symbology as a means of anything they're an enemy of the state actually they're an enemy of the world. Yes and all I'm saying is an enemy of people that it would be easier for me as a human to exist and not feel um attacked if that was just not allowed and that's kind of my point is that yes hate speech ultimately points a finger at the person doing it as being in the wrong but it still hurts people and I and I think that's my point is that like why why are those words allowed in the YouTube comments section I don't know just hey YouTube maybe make hate speech not allowed in YouTube you know you have AI you can figure out you're connected to Google you can pull those words and not allow people to post them that is perfectly reasonable the words that we're getting posted tonight we're like in the top 10 list of words that are hate speech so that should that should be pulled should have been easy yeah that's my point is like just no no hate speech and I'm very disappointed in Gwen Stefani can I just say uh fun fact fun fact uh her and my uh my pops were Whole Foods buddies they would used to go shopping at Whole Foods together I just I'm amazed as she's turned out which okay for for reference they somebody was spoofing Gwen Stefani as part of and then uh it's uh oh gosh the free software guy I can never remember his name free software guy a guy who thinks he wants to all software to be open source he's like a little bit of a theoretically an activist for open sourcedness anyway they used his name and image is one of things so there were spoofing sites as part of this as well oh and um added any of the names that you saw associated with those because they had nothing to do with the real people well luckily they've been deleted but also the twitch chat room is telling us that twitch already does that so youtube just has to catch up it seems like so yeah it's for this year for my birthday it's just right like the guy who stormed the capital and then it was like uh I'm at the White House which was yeah like yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah um always good yeah our and Laura was saying that he was let's see he saw a pot speaking of stuff different things he saw the podcast factually with Adam Canover the latest episode has major errors in it and he's wondering about prior episodes of it being accurate private wait what previous episodes being prior episodes being accurate it's a show called factually there are errors in it I mean that's a good question sometimes after doing a show I mean in sometimes errors are made if they don't if they don't correct those errors that's a problem um but yeah we're a live show and we make errors we try and we try and correct errors though when we make mistakes and say hey wrong it's not really a dinosaur it's a flying lizard is a pterosaur or whatever like I'm making more errors it's like as I go that's Stephen Reigns been giving Gwen Gwen Stefania talking to me that's funny but yeah I mean I think there's a lot of media out there that you you know you trust trust it and I hope the same for for twist you know you enjoy listening to it it's a piece of information and you can go hey that's awesome and you can confirm it if you know if it's there's links there's links links and yes at the website yes so if you got what was that story I need to make sure I can confirm that and get the details right you can go look at the the links there's even even in the disclaimer tonight when I when I was quoting from the the Yale study on trust beliefs there's even a link next to the disclaimer that you could go to the website and find and maybe find out uh read some more interesting stuff from that poll oh I'm supposed to put a link in the disclaimer this week actually what's interesting uh is that one of the things I didn't even get to there is that despite all of those numbers of who believes what is what 86% said they did support funding of alternative energy so even if you don't think global warming is real or that global scientists know what they're talking about or any of the rest of it even the some percentage of those people or even like yeah electric cars are cool like of course we need that we need windmills and solar power of course we do like 86% which it's higher than the number that are even concerned about global warming are still like yeah solar panels down that's that's fantastic that does also place to focus on on this uh solar panels windmills well it's because like who doesn't want to harness the power of the sun you know it's we can't run out of it we already do it's how ATP works or something like it's that's like the basis of life photosynthesis yes that's how photosynthesis as well vitamin D imagine cooling your home with the same sun that's making it hot and even if you're even if you're one of these people who doesn't eat their veggie terribles uh I love veggies the food that you eat that's what they're eating so you still need the you know sun to do everything I love isn't it wonderful thing like we talk about plants we think about plants as being the users of the sun but we harness the power of the sun ourselves through our skin even though we try to block it with sun blocks and melanin and stuff it's still the sun is important to us it makes vitamin D it helps to strengthen our bones it helps build our immune systems we we are powered by the sun yes that's amazing so why would the same degree as plants but power yeah and plants another really good point uh thanks we need critical thinking should get a grant but then I'd have to write the grant all right during the eight weeks where we are in the new lockdown I'll do the grant writing while we're in the lockdown wait a minute where we're in lockdown hold on a second I'm in lockdown and I have to write a grant this is this is worse oh my goodness oh I'm yawning I'm sleepy I think tired maybe getting there plant powered cat powered per powered do you know what happens this weekend what I could never not tell people it's your birthday yep it's my birthday this weekend I hope to do a river float I would like to be nice and hot up here and yes I love a river float yeah I'm gonna get out on her hopefully get out on a river have a nice day water and inner tubes and kayaks and sun and soggy sandwiches yes good there's always a sandwich that ends up at the bottom of the boat what you do is you use like well I guess Kai's not using them anymore but like the the like the food pouches are perfect I did eat those a bit when I was giving them to Kai they were good they're great they're good little pick-me-ups I get it okay so is this too bad for the planet though people I was just about to say you're talking about individual mine mineral school snacks packaged completely in plastics yes I stopped I I did them a little bit but usually it was the jars glass you can recycle them too you can send them back in and they'll they'll raise them you can however uh the one like worry about the planet time out is is uh is babies yeah that's also true yeah yeah it's you're gonna that's the one no no there's two babies hospitals and hospitals and research to an extent because they use so what are we gonna do because everybody gets a time the hospital is like you can't be reusing stuff no ooh our lure I want that for my birthday that's what I'm gonna drink on my birthday I'm just very curious is this a child friendly float or is this an adult's only float it will be child friendly child friendly I've done very different floats yeah I've done very different floats intertubes with the intertubes where we had a cake a couple kegs of beer that were strapped to one of the intertubes is this the american river yes yes I've done the american river a few times yeah and we're roped so you would pull your rope up close to the kegs and then you would pull your intertube along with it and then you could fill your cup and then push off and be oh it was a bad idea terrible idea it was not something there's not something I would advise people do it's a thing you do when you're young in the central valley and you go hmm I'm gonna float in the direct sunlight uh not drink any water barely eat any food and just gonna be all day for like four hours yeah again in direct sunlight not in the water apply your sunscreen a bunch of drunk people yes on the river floating and then there's some rapids and then there's occasional rapids too it's not even like it's just calm water the whole time oh yeah the the american river we used to call it the easy float because it was like there was one little tiny yes yes this was then this was the sacramento river okay we hit real rapids okay there were no rapids ever we called it the easy float because that's all all you had to do was float and just hope that you paddled enough to get to the last bus yes at the end of the float absolutely because you pull over because you want to you want to milk it right of course yeah for sure um I'm going to the yuba in September very excited about that yeah I did that a couple years ago it was so fun well I've never been to the yuba river in a park that's I mean I helped no no this is no when you said this they're like I've been to the I used to go swimming in the river all the time but it was like kind of like a big creek like I don't remember I must have been well yeah I was not at a big rivery river river park like if you've been on the american river it's not that it's currently 87 feet the yuba river google crunchy gamer you're fired oh well he said twist is 60 not you oh how would that be possible the implications are there come on I haven't been doing it that long yeah well I don't know oh my goodness you know time folds in on itself it's fine yeah the full time does fold in on itself like oh is this my new lifetime oh this is my new thing okay oh no I know I'm sorry this is a typo no it wasn't what did you mean to him what does a dog years well this okay this show is 20 years I really like 10 that's it okay yeah so it's dog years I'll cut our legacy in half and say it's only been 10 years I mean my stint is about to be 10 years in January no yes wow it's amazing yeah we'll have to get you a little plaque that says you're tenured ha ha yes yes yes yes yes we should have maybe we should have celebratory plaques oh my god I can we also do employee of the month oh okay yeah one that you can win how about how about longest sustained rant without anybody else speaking oh uh-huh okay but I forgot you do you're into that you've got like the wall of trophies oh yeah I got a new one I got a new one before I retired from bowling you did not retire from bowling well I retired from my team yeah uh because I have to start going into the office and it's going to take me like two hours to get from the office to the bowling alley that's hard so yeah that makes sense maybe you need to start going to the pacifica bowling yeah alley because or or one in san jose or you know there's not two hours away yeah those are the options I'll figure it out but then I'd have to I'd have to not bowl with the people that I bowled with for seven years which would be sad but I would um but uh the team that won first place gave me one of their first place trophies so that's my new trophy that's like right here boop is a first place trophy because my tenth frame gave them first place because we were playing the team that was against them for first place and so because I clinched that last game our team earned a point gave us like fourth place or something like that but it put the second team out and so this other team won first place and so they were very thankful and it was a team that I've been playing with for all seven years they've been in the league and so we know each other and they were all very psyched and they were all watching me play because they were done and it was is very intense and so yeah they they gave me one of their first place trophies which was very sweet so I can't really tell is that a uh a guy fox mask in the uh inside of the rebel that's amazingly beautifully made yeah Brian did that obviously that's fantastic um he also um uh regularly puts on the mandalorian mask it's just like he'll just put it on whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa wait let's just keep this conversation good friendly no he'll he'll return to his school work just in his helmet at the computer he's like I just need to wear this while I do my school work and you know what I can't blame him that's fantastic and what is this what is this book on like the little music stand it's oh it's princess bride it's an illustrated version of the princess bride okay okay and we were very nice we were looking we were looking for a bookshelf on facebook marketplace and this contraption came up a book stand and we were like perfect well we have to buy that so also Brian uh we'll periodically come in and change the page to another illustration so if you go back through the youtube pages they're almost always different I'm only just now like yeah really focusing on the background he's like he's like you're a chair of stores we'll we'll find we'll find frames in past episodes and do a stop action of the book changing pages yeah that's great right when did twists start on katie vs radio 1999 2000 something like that yeah yep exactly 10 years blare in the previous millennia I remember when you were just like this tall no incorrect number one she was babysitting cock yeah I mean remember when I was wearing uh like a cocktail dress to twist and giant hoops I do remember that yeah you were gonna go clubbing oh was it clubbing I thought she was gonna go see the re-release of beetle juice how dare listen I had a style I have a different style now but I enjoyed that style and I look back up and I have no regrets I am not judging in the negative at all okay beetle juice is a great movie was a great movie yeah beetle juice right uh yeah have you not seen this oh I almost did I almost fell right into the trap don't say it again have you not seen this get out no I wasn't emo I want I want to make that very clear I was not got I was not emo I just had like a very specific yeah you were a San Francisco girl who dressed all in black but not got because you don't want to be pigeonholed no I wasn't that type of girl who dresses all in black there's actually quite a myriad of things you can be all dressed in black growing up in San Francisco could be in the court cure fan that that works that would work which is kind of goth though it was not goth I was not goth at all no okay black lipstick no okay never you know it was red she had red lipstick it was very red yeah very red very red I like a bold lip I still like a bold lip I just don't do that anymore because of masks I tried this huh I went through this is probably really hurt the lipstick industry hasn't it um let me tell you I recently so because I moved in the middle of the pandemic I lost all of my lipstick I had no idea I honestly I I had like probably six flavors colors what do you want to call it of lipstick that like that were my lipstick and then they were all in a little pouch and because I hadn't used it for 18 months no idea it moved somehow it's in this house I don't and I went to put on some lipstick and I was like I guess I have to buy new lipstick this is something I just not have not thought about for 18 months yeah it's pretty great I only did do eye makeup every day when I was working summer camp I have to worry about the rest of my face it's great I tried a bold lip for a while right around the time that head wig in the angry inch came out and it was my goal to learn how to do that glitter red lipstick that they did so my friend my friend taught me how to do the glitter red lip and so I had this really red lipstick and I had a pot of really fine awesome red glitter fancy I have shiny lips on my long and then you left glitter on every cup that you use no I loved it I'd go to a party and I'd be like I'm gonna kiss everyone because I'd leave glitter on everyone oh my gosh it's like that you put your cheek and you get a lip on your cheek it's like that oh no what it was it it was a buffet test at the start of the pandemic do you remember that they had they yeah so they had one person at a buffet they put like fluorescent bacteria on their hand or whatever and then everybody served themselves at the buffet and um by Anthony oh it was there wasn't any real food it was all fake food and stuff right it was like it was all miming but at the end it was everywhere was this a is this a myth busters thing or no I think I saw something where they did that on myth busters too where they okay maybe and then they had a party and then they said okay one person in there had this fluorescence on their hands coming in and this was their cold right and then at the end of the like people just having a get together which nobody knew that they were part of they then put on the black lights and you could see it like all over everybody's faces and hand like everywhere that they touched this thing had transferred uh yeah I mean this this isn't the first one but they were a bunch that happened right at the start of COVID because they wanted to explain like why buffets were canceled and all this kind of stuff um but yeah this is glitter man buffets were canceled because of glitter I think I remember what you were talking about but yeah stuff ended up everywhere all right here I'm gonna try and figure out how to manage allowed words what words are allowed and not on the live chat see if I can set that a little bit more firmly yeah well that power okay you wouldn't have thought you'd have to type these words into that but um that sucks yeah and I would think it would be easier to find information on how to change them I will keep going oh yeah yeah that was that was the other that's right Gord the uh other other note a little thread of that myth buster was uh kari being a germaphobe a germaphobe and actually coming out pretty clean yep germaphobes are paying attention and not getting your gross oh and they did one on double dipping potato chips and it turned out it's not everywhere uh double dippers double dippers and people use it's like just one person doing a double dip and there is bacteria in your dip like it's yeah oh yes are in lore looking forward to the germ laden world we're gonna dive in I'm gonna look oh and then we're all gonna be out sick hey who doesn't want a good old-fashioned cold again remember you're just like oh I got a cold and people are like ah all right well you know no I don't want it I don't want it either um so before we go just heads up again that um next week I will be joining this show late oh that's right okay so that's next week yeah um so if you could put the animal corner at the end that would be great okay um maybe missing Wednesday the 18th okay so it's like two weeks from now okay do you are you gonna give me your stream yard login yes great can we do a play with it before yeah you go because I've never done it okay great yes okay I love it yeah we have I was just thinking about it and going look who's trying to get employee the month first month that it's even available why you don't miss a beat do you Blair I want my demon that plaque don't make picture of the one oh yeah oh my goodness don't double dip wear your masks be careful out there folks we hope that you're doing the best that you can hey somebody's supposed to say good night to somebody so you night Justin good night Justin say good night Blair good night Blair good night good night everyone thank you for joining us once again for this zoomie episode of this week in science we do hope you have a great week take care see you next week we will be here coming back after I end the broadcast and then we come back later next week okay bye