 This is TWIS, this week in Science episode number 563 recorded on Wednesday, April 20th, 2016. The most important Earth Day. Hey everyone, I am Dr. Kiki, and once again this week in Science is here to fill your heads with a bit of monkey business, stinky lemurs, and blueprint Earth, but first. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. The world as we know it was not always the world as we know it now. It has changed a lot over four billion years. It started without much oxygen. If you were to time travel three billion years into the past, you would suffocate on the air itself. But oxygen producing periodic algae changed that. It took a while, but slowly over hundreds of millions of years. Tiny whiffs of oxygen were released from the blue-green algae in the sea. Build the atmosphere with so much of the oxygen that it turned the planet into a giant snowball. But time again was our friend, and the planet found equilibrium with an oxygen-rich atmosphere. Life flourished. Yes, there were still trials, asteroid impacts, global warming, and cooling. Some life survived most did not. But just enough survived to allow us humans time to evolve. And as much as we humans would like to think that the story ends here, that the arrival of us, the world has now reached its final permanent state, we know better. We know that tiny emissions of oxygen were enough to change the balance of an atmosphere in the past. We know that massive emissions of CO2 today will change the balance of an atmosphere for tomorrow. And the reason we know it is because we have frequently tuned into This Week in Science, coming up next. Find the knowledge I seek. I want to know what's happening. What's happening. What's happening this week in science. What's happening. What's happening. What's happening this week in science. Science, Ike and Blair, and Jess, we have a guest. Welcome. That's right. And welcome to you, Justin, Jess and Blair, and everyone out there to another episode of This Week in Science. We are back yet again to bring you some great science news from the past week. But we're also looking ahead a couple of days. Those of you listening to the podcast may be getting it on Earth Day. 422 April, 2016 is Earth Day. And it's a pretty big day. We've got some news about that. And it's part of the reason why we invited Jess Palais to join us today. She is the co-founder and CEO of Blueprint Earth, an organization that is working to create blueprints of the ecosystems on our planet. And so we're going to get to an interview with Jess in just a few moments. But a couple of science stories that I've also brought. We also have stories about wacky mushrooms. That's what I've got. And I've also got, yes, a lot of climidia stories. Yeah. Justin, what did you bring? I got No Fossil Fuel Futures, Panama Paper Monkey Business, and Iron Eating. And Iron Eating. And Blair, what do you have? I have the smelly lemurs you were talking about before. I have freezing cold lab mice. And I have raft building ants returning again to the show. I see. I suppose. Yes. In the case of the great flooding that is yet to come, be sure to take a look at the ants and look for the rafts. Just grab a few million ants. You'll be set. That's great. Okay. So let's get into the show for tonight. We've got a lot of stuff on the docket. So first order of business. Not such good news coming out of Australia. This has been news for a couple of weeks now. But the Great Barrier Reef is bleached. And when I say bleached, I don't mean somebody came in and poured a bunch of bleach on the Great Barrier Reef. What happened is temperatures have been hot. And so it's forcing these symbiotic organisms, the coral in the coral reef, to eject their zooplankton. The zooplankton are leaving. They're no longer doing their wonderful photosynthesis and energy transformation to the coral. And the coral are dying pretty much. 93% of the Great Barrier Reef is experiencing bleaching this year. This is more than has ever been reported before. And this is not necessarily the death knell for 93% of the barrier reef, as reefs do come back from these bleaching events. Very often it's not a full mortality. It's just an episodic thing and there is recovery. So this year, though, in the northern sector of the Great Barrier Reef, which is the least touched by humans because it's the furthest away from the touristy stuff, it also happens to be in the hottest water. And so as a result, there is an expected 50% mortality in this almost pristine section of the Great Barrier Reef, while the central and southern portions are expected to recover. So this is about on par with my ability to keep an aquarium stocked with fish. And which I'm discovering. I mean, this is a great ecological study of my own at home, like getting suckered into or cuted into buying fish for the kids. I found this is not an easy little, this is a very complicated ecosystem. And it can change quickly the chemistry in the water just in the few gallons that I've got. Well, Justin's been muted. Justin, unmute yourself. So yeah, so it's terrifying that this is happening on a larger ecosystem on a global scale that's found a good equilibrium for tens of thousands of years. Well, and coral reefs not only are very important, habitats for fish and part of this food web, but they also give us a great deal of our oxygen. That's right. So coral is kind of important. Coral is kind of important. And the Great Barrier Reef is not the only location coral bleaching is taking place. This is happening worldwide. 2016 is already on mark to be the hottest year on record. We've had the first three months of the year already hotter than any other. So in our recorded, modern recorded history at least. So this is, it's looking like we still might have more to come. I mean, what we're looking at as well as southern hemisphere is going to be coming out of its summer very soon. So soon, hopefully cooler temperatures will prevail and the Great Barrier Reef will get some respite. But aside from that, the Earth's future, right? What's going on with the Earth? We've got hot temperatures, 2016 looking hot. What is going on in the future? Well, one, there are a few possible good things that could happen. One of them is that on April 22nd, 2016, Earth Day, the Chinese president and the United States president have issued a joint statement. They've all said that they are going to send people to the Paris climate to sign the Paris climate agreements on Friday. And so while this doesn't necessarily mean that it's all going to be fixed right away, it is a show of support for trying to do something about the problem that we face. So this is the proposals of incremental steps. We'll actually be signed that they will consider the signature of the proposed potential incremental steps after further review. I mean, it's something. It's something. If two of the... Without that, you can't have a political will to unlock funds to actually press it. Exactly. So I get that that actually means something. Yes. If it continues forward with the funding. For this to actually move forward, the agreement does need to get 55 countries to sign, and that will account for 55% of the global emissions, which is the minimum of global emissions. Even though the IPCC is saying that, well, you know, even if we kind of look at this Paris climate agreement and what was negotiated from that, we're still not going to... We're still going to go above the two degrees Celsius. So even more needs to be done. But let's talk about some... I'm just going to pause it for a second because that sounds like they're doing some sort of delegate count for whether or not the thing passes. You have the U.S. and China on board. You're getting close. If you can get India, you might have very quickly. The majority of the planet's population's government representation already... What other little countries are we going to... If Papua New Guinea is like, I don't know. Don't want to be part of it. Is that going to be enough to sway the balance? That's kind of ridiculous the way they do voting in international affairs. Well, but it also... It's a huge statement because American China are often pointed to as the carbon culprits. So if we can start to lead the way on this, we also... The two of us also lead a lot of the way in terms of energy and technology and that kind of stuff. So it's definitely... Those are the people you want at the table. Yes, it's important to have everyone else there, but people aren't going to pay as much attention unless America and China are part of the conversation. So that's fantastic news. And so let's talk about... I didn't want to get into the negative stuff that's happening surrounding climate as we come up to Earth Day. I want to talk about some of the positive things that are happening. So an interesting development. Dutch politicians, the lower house of the parliament in the Netherlands, and the lower house of parliament in the Netherlands has voted to ban the sale of gas motorized vehicles, cars by 2025. Petrol and diesel will be banned. It still has to pass the Senate in the Netherlands, but it's an interesting point that a country, that their politicians have come together to say we'd like to make a statement and move towards getting rid of fossil fuels, towards ending our reliance, toward not selling these vehicles. Let's push toward forcing people to buy electric. Let's not have any other options. And that's the kind of stuff that people start doing. People need to put their actions where their mouths are, right? Exactly. And then, I think Justin, you wanted to get on this story as well. This is a fantastic story. Yeah, a researcher, Professor Benjamin Sovacool, is the director of the Sussex Energy Group at the University of Sussex. He has published a paper in the journal Energy Research and Social Science, which has looked at energy transitions through history. So looking at the historical perspective of how we've gone from one form of energy consumption to the next. Oh, you're going to give an example? Oh yeah. So for example, when we look backwards, gosh, these things take time. And again, this is the politicians with the incremental increments of incremental change taking place. You look at something like coal in Europe that was around 130 years to go from wood to coal. Using electricity in the mainstream took about 63 years from a point when nobody had it. But then things are speeding up. These things do take time. And again, even though there can be political pressure to stop it, we live in a technology-rich adaptive society now. So there's also, there's the city of Ontario, between 2003 and 2014, which I think is 11 years. It weaned itself entirely off of coal. That was 11 years. Indonesia took three years to move two-thirds of the population from kerosene stoves to natural gas stoves. And another example of speed is France. They started their nuclear program in 1970. It was at 4% of the power supply. And it was 40% just by 1982, just in 12 years. So the professor's point is, we can feel or act or talk like these transitions are going to require a huge amount of time in which to be enacted. But his point is that actually if you have the political will, you can do these things very quickly. Right. So if there is no political will behind it, yes, it's going to take a long time to shift consumer behavior to shift the behavior of a whole populace to a different format. Especially if there's no reason for them to necessarily switch rapidly on their own. But once you start getting lots of people behind it, politicians, the people, corporations, and people all start moving together in a coordinated and organized way, we can change things maybe in just a couple of decades. I mean, if the climate can change this fast, why can't we? Come on. Come on. So with all of this and the things that we're trying to do positively to change the way that we use energy to change the interactions that we have with the earth, I'd like to bring Jess Palayas into the conversation. Like I said, she's from Blueprint Earth. She's a scientist, historian, and adventurer from her bio on her website. Her specialty is active volcanoes. Maybe she likes jumping in them. I don't know. We'll talk about that. And natural hazards. She's worked on projects spanning six continents. She's currently in Germany. Jess has had professional relationships with the United States Geological Survey, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, California State University Dessault Systems, and other Fortune 500 companies. She's a member of the American Geophysical Union, Geological Society of America, and the International Association of Volcanology and Chemistry of the Earth's Interior, and the Geophysical Extreme Events Reconnaissance Association. That's a cool one. But beyond all your scientific know-how, you're also an amazing science communicator. So can you just tell us a bit about what you're trying to do with Blueprint Earth and what you're working on right now? Well, I think Blueprint Earth in a nutshell is something that's going to be at the vanguard of the next wave of environmental science and of how we address the big picture problems that are facing us in the 21st century and beyond. We can't continue to overly specialize and then get more and more and more detailed with things. So what Blueprint Earth is doing is kind of unifying scientific efforts and saying, okay, we have an environment. It's very complex. We need to look at both the micro and the macro level. So let's get into the little details but then connect it all. So we're really doing environmental science research and we're doing education because we want to make sure that the next generation of scientists are approaching problems from an interdisciplinary, like a true interdisciplinary perspective. We want to make sure that geologists know how to talk to engineers. They know how to talk to biologists and hydrologists. So really what we're doing at Blueprint Earth, just as the name says, is we are cataloging Earth's environments to create Blueprints. So we're basically finding out the connections that exist to look at the whole thing from a systems perspective. Everything on the planet is a system, whether it's your own cardiovascular system or whether it's a system that allows the canyon mouse in the desert to eat plants and then be eaten by predators in the desert. So that's what we're doing, really, is just looking at things from a broader perspective and rolling up our sleeves and getting the work done. So can you tell me a little bit? I mean, this sounds huge. I mean, ecosystems, complex systems with so much involved and so much intertwined. How do you even go about beginning to catalog an ecosystem? It's actually pretty straightforward. When we started Blueprint Earth, the idea was we don't want to reinvent the wheel. I mean, there is too much good science that has already been done. So we borrowed techniques from existing scientific methods. So we would use current techniques for monitoring a spring or sampling the water from a spring. We use biology techniques, you know, how to trap and release small mammals. So basically, you literally just first step, go out and see everything that's in the environment. We're working in the Mojave Desert in California. It's our test environment, like our proof of concept site, mainly because it has relatively lower biodiversity compared to, say, the Amazon. So we are out there in the Mojave. We have teams of scientists and students doing this hands-on fieldwork. I mean, really just the basic level is what is in the square kilometer that we're looking at. Then from there, once you have all of the foundation, you say, okay, we know what's there. That's when you start to make a series of interconnected Venn diagrams, and that's the Blueprint. So we're at the stage right now where we have literally thousands of observations that we've collected. I mean, it's been a massive effort over the last three years since we started, and we've had over 100 researchers out in the desert for weeks at a time working on this, because it is, it's a labor-intensive effort, but nobody said it was going to be easy. So you're taking a grid, you're taking a particular area of the Mojave Desert. I mean, this is a fairly standard biological ecosystem sampling method where you take a grid and you go maybe like 10 foot by 10 foot squares, parsecs, and you move through it bit by bit. Are you going to do multiple selection points within the Mojave Desert? Are you just going to look at this one particular plot and then move on to another ecosystem? How are you going about that? So right now the idea is we're going to focus on this area, and in particular a more biologically interesting, well, NGO and hydrologically interesting part of the area when we do our environmental recreation, which is the end goal. We need enough information so that we can create a functioning environment. Now that is open to a little bit of interpretation. Obviously we're not going to put a big horn sheep in a man-made environment that we've created. That would be very cruel. So we need to make sure that we can account for all the factors that go into the environment. I would love to say that we could do all sorts of areas in the Mojave and all sorts of areas around the world. That's the goal. We see this project as being huge, like way bigger than any one person's lifetime. So ideally we do the Mojave and we get a functional recreation of the environment and then we move on to the tundra and then the grasslands and we get more and more complex with our environments as we get better at the process. You have to refine and refine until you really get what you want. So right now I'm going to go with let's finish this portion of the Mojave and then it's basically if anybody has an environment that they would like us to blueprint when we're proving this whole technique, we can consult for governments, we can consult for private industry companies and basically show them how to do blueprints because we really want to create a database that is public for anybody in the world, any researchers, any teachers, anybody who wants to know what's in a given environment that they can actually start to use the data for their own projects. So that's the end goal. I think it's a wonderful goal. What do you think about, I mean, we're looking at environments that have already been affected by human activity. So the sample, the time point of sampling is here and now, we're already in the throes of a changing climate. How do you feel about how your blueprint technique is going to work for, I mean, how do we account for that? How do you keep up? How do you keep up with the change? Yeah, exactly. So obviously, we're not going to go out and continue to blueprint these things over and over and over again. What we're more going for is it's close to a snapshot of the environment because we see it as, right now, things are changing. We can't deny that. We've even seen very different things happen in our current research area over the last three years. We've seen different water flow. The stream flux is variable and we're starting to see that perhaps it's not in line with past trends. Things like that. So we're just saying, let's see what's here now and let's understand how it's working now. And so an interesting thing that I hadn't really thought too much about when we started this is invasive species and their presence and what they're contributing to the environment. So if you're an environmental purist and you came out to our field area in the Mojave, you'd say, oh, all of this red-brome grass doesn't belong there. It's not native. However, the grass is part of the currently functioning ecosystem and it is allowing other animals to feed off of it and it's impacting what's going on there. So while you might get more invasives or you might have species die out, either before or after you do a blueprint, that's fine. We're just saying what is here right now and the environment is functioning. All the ones that we're going to look at, one of the prerequisites is that it's functioning at some level. So we obviously wouldn't want to take a toxic waste dump or something and do that. We're looking for a healthy environment and that could mean invasives are present. So we just include it. I think your next spot should be Chernobyl. It was damaged, but right now there's a story out this week saying that the large predators are doing really well. It's an amazingly healthy ecosystem at this point, so that in itself would be kind of interesting to sample. That's what I tell people. I always tell them, earth is going to find ways that we haven't even thought of to deal with problems that we haven't even created yet. But for the ones we have created, I think having that blueprint, having that snapshot, just like if there were, I don't know, monarch butterflies in an area and you have them blueprinted in and you see all the connections that the monarch butterfly has with that environment and then a couple years later you realize they're gone. They've moved further north or to the east or they're just gone and you'll see immediately by looking at this blueprint, seeing what else was relying on it as a food source or for pollination or whatever, you can see all those connections that are then threatened by the loss of that from the environment. I think that'll be hugely important going forward as the snapshot does change. Depending on who needed the blueprint, if it's one of our publicly accessible just because the Mojave is a good place for students to go work and it was a great test site, then we're not going to have necessarily as much funding to go back and redo the blueprint. But if we're in an area that is crucial to a government or something like that, they might say, hey, go redo the blueprint in five or ten years. Let's see what's changed. That would be amazing to me just to see the sort of changes or the lack of changes. Either way. We have a couple of questions from our chat room. Strength is asking, does the Mojave blueprint involve insect pollination? Yes, actually it does. One of the things that we've begun to document is the presence of different bee species. We have this type of flowering plant in the Mojave called the bladder pod, very attractive name. It looks kind of like it sounds, but it has beautiful yellow flowers. It's also very stinky. Something about that, bees really enjoy. On the bladder pod alone, we see that it supports at least four different kinds of bees. It's amazing to sit next to a bladder pod bush and have 50 bees swarming around you, especially when you hear about all the bee die-outs going on. Plants like these are ones that we really, really, really see as key to the ecosystem functioning the way that it does. And then Dick Tell was asking, is the idea to make predictions about the effects of modifying some other ecosystems? So that is something that we could do. It's not so much what I personally do or the scientists we have on board at the moment do, but we do have connections with scientists who do a lot of modeling and predictive work. So that's why we're making the data set. It's all going to be publicly accessible, because I want people to contact us and say, hey, I want to get involved. Let me see your data. Let me crunch some numbers and let's see what we could get out of this in terms of modeling. I think that's going to be super important when we do areas that have critically endangered species, something to do with tigers or some such thing. If you want to see what's happening with the tigers, you can then remove elements of the ecosystem, put new ones in, and then that has applications for space travel down the line. You could put a bunch of environmental data from different environments all into computers and then optimize an environment that you would then take to the moon or to Mars. I think it's got a lot of applications. You bring nothing but iron-eating bacteria. This is what we're going to take. I think if I was to recommend, not as a reward, but just as a good second thing to be looking at, maybe take those students and researchers who've been in the Mojave Desert for three weeks at a time over three years. Take them to Mars, yeah. Then you could be doing island environments, and I bet you get a lot of volunteers. Oh, yes. I'm really looking forward to blue print Barbados. So what's the timeline for the Mojave project, and then once you have the blueprint model completed, do you think it'll speed up for future blue print? Yeah, definitely. You guys are familiar with this. In science, it's all dependent on funding, and we started with just being crowdsourced. We do everything on a shoestring budget, but we're now at the stage where we can start applying for some National Science Foundation grants, et cetera, et cetera. But let's go with the best case scenario. If someone drops exactly the amount of money in my lap that I need, which is actually probably less than you think, I could get started with doing full-on data analysis right now instead of little bits, and then we would be able to finish cataloging the Mojave. Ideally, the project should take about three years to go from cataloging to reconstruction of the environment in a controlled setting. So right now, we're looking probably at a five to six year timeframe from when we started to when we're actually going to be able to start reconstructing it. But yeah, I mean, three years would be totally reasonable if we had all the manpower, all the budget that we needed. Right. It all comes down to that budget, doesn't it? Fortunately, I'm not telling you about it. Right. So as you're moving forward with this, I mean, do you eventually hope that this is going to be picked up and we'll have all of the ecosystems on Earth, we'll be able to recreate all of them, we'll be able to fix those going wrong, we'll be able to predict what might happen in the future with climate change. Yeah, I mean, kind of my vision for Blueprint Earth is that it outlives everybody who started it and that we have citizen scientists trained around the world to do local environmental cataloging, say in their local parks and things like that, involving younger kids, getting people really invested in the science that's right there in their community for them to do to help understand how environments are impacted by human growth and development and changing weather and things like that. But I really would love it if we had at the very, very, very minimum a blueprint of each of the seven biomes that exist on Earth. We're going desert, tundra, grasslands, you know, things like that, jungle. That would be, that's our minimum goal right now. But once, you know, we don't want to hold all this knowledge for ourselves. This isn't for us to profit off of. This is literally to understand the environment better because we think that it's the heritage of everybody on the planet. So if I can train as many people as possible and how to do what we're doing, then that's the goal. And there's as much as a horrified blare and may not be quite the intent of the original project. One of the things with the, you know, potential drastic change of 6, 7, 8, 9 degrees over the next 80-ish years, it might be about sort of recreating environments, ecosystems for different temperate zones. The temperate zone has changed in this region and you have a really good blueprint of what worked somewhere else in a similar, you know, environment. And the population that's there has done really poorly. So you might be able to do some sort of reconstruction. You're talking about zoos and wild animal parks. I'm sort of talking about treating the actual open free ecosystem as though we have to be at stewards because that change of that many degrees and that short a period of time is otherwise just going to be devastating. So there may be a need for utilizing blueprints places other than where they were built. And I do feel like you're misrepresenting me here, but I understand why you kind of took that leap. But I totally, I'm totally on board with what you're saying. I understand that if a certain habitat is now not able to support what it did before and there's another space where it could be supported, that's absolutely a situation where we can step in and fix that. If you recall, my main thing that I was upset about was bringing Willy Mammon's back and putting them somewhere they don't belong. That's a very different type of thing. I will say the thing that I'm most excited about about this project is people actually doing real science out in the field that has real consequences that are positive. And I think that when we're trying to create new scientists and inspire new scientists, whether they be in elementary school or middle school or college or graduate school, it's sometimes you find yourself doing practice science a lot, which is not often the most inspiring way to teach people how to science, right? So being able to bring people out into an active project in this way sounds like a fantastic way to get a bunch of people onto this project and into all the different fields of science that have to work together to really get this done. And that's what we've seen. I just posted on, we have a little hidden group for the lumps of blueprint earth basically. And I made a post on Facebook earlier this week that said, congratulations, we have a student who's working now, she got a scholarship to work on tectonic stuff in South Africa, a student who just got into master's program at UCLA in engineering, a student who just got a geological society of America research grant, and a bunch of others who are going to grad school. And they've said, I got this because of my experience with blueprint earth. It really helped me get in there because I could say I did real research and I understand what it's like to work across disciplines. So we're already seeing that as an impact and nothing makes me happier because it's like this short term impact for individuals. And it keeps kind of my eye on the prize for the long term, somebody give me funding sort of thing. Yeah, well I think that especially if you're thinking about a project that's going to last potentially several lifetimes, the way to get that work done in the end is to have this legacy and to have people keyed into this important work from the time that they're kids so that then when they're adults, they can inspire the generation that will take it after them. And that just, it sounds very powerful to me, I'm pretty excited. In my day, we didn't even know about the desert biome. I still remember going to the Mojave in my senior year of college and catching lizards and snakes and all these things for a survey that we were doing and being shocked, just shocked at the amount of life in the desert. People are amazed. It's like nobody, people think a desert is sand and that's it. And I'm like, no, no, no, it's incredible. I mean we have bobcats, there's mountain lions that have, there's one that has his or her area that covers our field area. There's big horn sheep, there's lizards, there's turtles, well tortoises. There's toads, we have tadpoles in our field area. So it just blows people's minds. So much life. I'm wondering, is there a way since you're dealing with just the data side of things, is there a way to comb through old ecology papers because there are hundreds of years of people going into the field to survey ecosystems and to find out about the webs that hold everything together. Is there any way to comb through the literature and put it into your blueprint? It's called student volunteers. Yes, actually that's one of the things we really want to do and that's one of the reasons we picked the Mojave is because it's relatively well understood and for our first project we didn't want to say, oh let's go somewhere no one's ever been and make it all crazy. We said let's go to a place where people have done research where there's a fellow named Jim Andre who works for the UC school system and he supervised and directed a vascular plant inventory of the Mojave so they already know that there are 40,000 species of different plants in the Mojave and that doesn't even include the mosses and lichens. So we can look to work like that and say, oh yeah okay, this is a bladder pod and this isn't and that's what we cross-reference everything we do. We double check with things that we're not sure on and we do tap into networks of people who've been there done that and then the literature too. It's really full scale and we don't want to reinvent the wheel so if somebody already knows what a certain species is and it looks like the thing we found, great, that's good. Yeah, and Hot Rod is asking, is there some sort of validation on your process of blueprinting? What happens if there are mistakes in there? So there are going to be mistakes. I've just reconciled myself to that. Especially if you're dealing with volunteers. Oh my god, yes. So what we do is in the field the volunteers, especially the students who are new to it, they're either working with students who have been out there before and so they're familiar with our specific process and they're returning for a second, a third, a fourth time with us or they're working with supervisory scientists and those are professors or people from industry who have volunteered their time and have come out there with us. So in the field there's hands-on validation. Like we check, we say, okay show me what you were doing. Let's see if that works. We have a standardized process that everybody follows. So if you're doing vegetation transects, we actually have a guide on how to do it. You can put it up on your smart phone. You can print it out. And then we go back and forth. The more senior scientists go back and forth and check everything out as we're going. And then during quality control, we have people who did not collect the data doing the quality control on the data. And then if we have questions, we go back to the original researcher who collected the information and say, what did you mean here? But everything is geo-referenced. Every piece of data we have. So everything has a waypoint associated with it in a Google Earth type or ArcGIS type of file. And we have pictures of every single thing we've observed. So you can imagine what our Dropbox storage looks like. Absolutely insane. That's so neat, though. I mean, to be able to, at some point, make all of this information available to people, to be able to sift through and be able to dig through and go, okay, this plant, this location, and also be able to correlate that with other locations and with the animals that come to it and all of a sudden be able to put all the information together for any one point in space. Oh, yeah. And we're already starting to see that. We've noticed some preliminary correlations. And we're starting to investigate those a bit more. One of the really interesting things that we saw are there's a plant called Yurba Monsa. And it's actually being studied a little bit for as a cancer treatment. But Yurba Monsa grows in marshy areas like damp. And we do have a lot of dampness around the spring in our field site. So the Yurba Monsa plants are present kind of throughout where the spring is. But there are frogs, or sorry, I should say toads. Toads are only found in pools where there is Yurba Monsa. No Yurba Monsa, no toads. But you can have Yurba Monsa without toads. So it seems like the toads only like the areas where there's Yurba Monsa plants. So we're already seeing that, and that's just a casual sort of observation. And there are many more. But it's amazing to see it unfold. This is just wonderful. Do you have any plans for Earth Day? Let me see. That's in two days. Like I said, I'm in Germany, so I'm actually going to be, well, I'm going to Stockholm. So I'm going to be in Sweden and checking out the tundra. Awesome. Yes, yeah, we're traveling. We're slowly making our way back to Los Angeles. So I have to all spend the 22nd birthday in Sweden in a totally new environment, and then drooling over potential cataloging opportunities for Blueprint Earth. I'm sure. Do you have, as you're finishing up, or finishing but working on the Mojave, I mean, are you basically setting your plans up and getting ready to be able to go as soon as you have the funding on other idea, on other biomes? Yes. Yes. Get it all ready to go. Yeah, we already sifted through, and I'd love to run multiple projects simultaneously. That would be amazing. Then I could hire a good amount of staff and have people, one person running the tundra, one person running Kansas. I was just going to say that sounds like a lot of staff. Yeah, yeah. And so that's the thing, too, is we want to be able to give people jobs doing this. I mean, it would be incredible to say, we're creating jobs, we're protecting the environment, and we're educating the next generation of scientists and citizen scientists. I mean, that's what we're going for. That sounds like several categories of grants right there that should be becoming easy to go. I basically need a team of grant writers to get the money to do all of this. Those are the people you really got to find, yeah. Those are sometimes the most important people to the... Oh, but grant writers are like $70 an hour. So until then, it's DIY grant writing. Or until then, people can donate to support your organization. Oh, yeah. Not to say a nonprofit. So this is, I know we just passed tax day, so for next year's taxes, if you haven't donated already, this is something that can help you out at the end of the year. Yes. And you can go to blueprintearth.org to be able to find information on donating. And there are nice buttons, red buttons. Just click it, and I'm sure it'll be a self-explanatory procedure. Yes, yes. And if you... We actually are about to start a program where if people want to come out in the field with us, say they're a retired geologist or just somebody who has an interest in science but has never been able to do anything like this, we're going to have a thing where if you donate a certain amount, you can come out to the desert with us because your donation will have funded the trip costs for two or three students. So that's something that we're working on and we should be releasing in the next month or so. And then that'll be for next fall. Obviously, we're not going to the desert in the summer because we're not insane. We go out there and we collect spring. We look at the spring, we monitor things, but we do not drag students out there when it's 112. That would be a little bit mean. Right, but then there are, like you said, just the opportunity to be able to volunteer and join you. Yeah. Is there, so... You guys can come. I mean, come on. If you already caught snakes and other reptiles, come on out. The twist team goes to the field. Let's do it. Come on. I think our next field season, I haven't firmed up the dates yet, but it'll probably be around Thanksgiving week of this coming year. So that will be one that people can join us for. You guys can come, hey. That would be fun. Nice. Mojave would be very nice and think around Thanksgiving. Oh, it's pretty great. That would be amazing. Is there any other than BlueprintEarth.org? Are there any other social media or other addresses that you'd like to send people to? I mean, you can just find us all over there. We're on Twitter, we're on Facebook, we're on Instagram, and it's all Blueprint Earth. You search for that on any of those, and that's us. So they're great ways to keep up with what we're doing, and you can always email us if you want more information. It's info at BlueprintEarth.org. So really easy to reach out and touch someone, as they say. But yeah, we're always happy to hear questions, comments, anything like that. And if people want to collaborate with us, I mean, I'm sure you've got plenty of scientist listeners. If people actually say, I want to get in on some of that awesome Mojave Desert action, just get in touch. Fantastic. I hope people do. That would be really great. Jess, thank you so much for joining us tonight. It's been just a pleasure talking with you and hearing all about what Blueprint Earth is doing. Oh, well, thank you guys for having me, and I'm so glad that it's very timely, especially with all that bad news out of Australia and with Earth Day right around the corner. So good timing on your part, and thank you so much. I'm going to drop off because I actually have to catch a train to Copenhagen. So at least being up this early in the morning, it's not like you're just going to go back to bed. You have to be up for a reason. Yes, exactly. And I'm going to go get some strong German coffee before I go. Perfect. Thank you all so much and have fun. Thank you. We will. Have a safe trip. Have your day. Have your day. Bye. Once again, that was Jess Palayas from BlueprintEarth.org, and what a fascinating, huge project. They are working on it. It's quite the undertaking. Wow. Let's just take the whole planet and figure out everything that's going on. It all fits together. Yep. No big thing. I love that there are people in the world who are not daunted by the big ideas, and that is just a wonderful, wonderful thing. Not daunted by the big ideas or like mountain lines. Or mountain gray. Or deserts or snakes. Send us postcards, Blair. Okay. From the field. If I can just get the time off, I'm there. They want me to go catch lizards and snakes. I think you'd be all right. All right. Okay, everybody, we're going to take a short break and we'll be back for the second half of our show with lots of science news. We've got some good science news coming your way. Stay tuned. This is This Week in Science. Hey, everybody. This Week in Science, like so many other things, is supported by listeners just like you. There are lots of ways that you can help support us. One is buying our stuff. We have merchandise available in our Zazzle Store and also at Cafe Press. So if you go to twist.org, you will find information for our Zazzle Store and also Cafe Press Store. Find all sorts of great hats and shirts, aprons, bags, mouse pads, or like Blair has a phone cover from one of her art projects that she drew last year. So you can get a phone cover or many other things covered with Blair art from Blair's Animal Corner or from the calendar from this year or the twist logo on its own. The Cafe Press Store has a lot of logos that were used early on in the twist days. Early 2000s. 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Is it that time already? What time is it? Time for Player's Animal Corner. Oh, it's my favorite. It's my favorite. Except for giant pandas. What you got, Blair, what you got? Oh, well, in order for me to tell you what I've got, I've got to get ready here. So let me just rub my wrist together. Are you trying to do shadow puppets? What are you doing? No, I've got to rub my wrist together. Did you put on perfume? Then I've got to rub my wrist on my chest here. Now I've got to rub my wrist all over my microphone. Okay, now you know it's mine. That expensive perfume. It's my microphone, you guys. That was my lemur impression. Ta-da! So lemurs. Wow. What is wrong with it? It is for 20. I mean, you know, never mind. Anyway. What did I... So lemurs, they're covered in scent glands and different species have them in different places. But a particular study looking at ring-tailed lemurs, they are particularly interesting because they're the lemur that spends the most time on the ground. They mark things a lot and they mark things all over the place because lemurs that spend most of their time in the trees, they're marking branches that they hang out on most often, but definitely ring-tailed lemurs, since they're up, they're down, they're all over. They're marking all sorts of different surfaces. Again, different lemur species have these scent glands in different areas, but these guys in particular, the ring-tailed lemurs, the ones they use most are on their wrists and on their chests. And fascinating. Can I pause things for you for a second and admit a huge gap in my ignorance of... Okay, hit me. What exactly are we talking about as a scent gland? Is that like armpits? Like how armpits sweat? What is a sweat gland? A scent... Okay, so an armpit would have scent glands in it if you took your sweat from your armpit and you rubbed it on things to mark them as yours. So that's really what we're talking about. It's not like there's some scent orifice on the wrist that I'm familiar with, but it's just sort of like that's a sweaty, stinky spot. Is it bacteria that's thick or is it that helps? What's getting you admitted? Great question. So these researchers at Duke, we're looking at particularly what was being created by the glands. So you're getting right to the heart of the issue here. So it's different in different areas. And this is really what the crux of this study found is that different glands in different parts of the body created different types of substances. So the glands on their wrist created clear, fast evaporating liquid. The glands on their chests created a brown, foul-smelling paste. Ew. That? Yeah. So they used these different substances to... Sometimes they use one, sometimes they use the other, sometimes they use a mix of both. Why? What are these different glands doing? What are these different substances doing? Well, we have a lot still to learn, but so far what we know for sure is that the foul-smelling paste is really what's good at marking the space. The clear stuff is really good at making it last. So if I was making a great perfume, I would need to mix a bunch of different things. I wouldn't just want to take some rose water, bottle it, and call it a day. What makes a perfume special is its lasting abilities, its combination of scents, perhaps certain hormonal responses, these are all part of it, right? So they found that they would combine these different scents for different reasons. So the main part of this research was taking these secretions and in a lab setting, putting them on different objects and then watching the lemurs respond to that. The lemurs paid more attention to mixtures over one or the other. They spent more time sniffing rods covered with mix secretions, more than just pure ones, but surprisingly they showed an even stronger preference for mix secretions after they let the scents air out. When it was fresh, they would sniff them. When it was old, they would lick them intently. So that would moisten the smell so that it kind of activated it again. Scratch and sniff, or lick and sniff in this case. Lick and sniff, yeah. Yeah, so they're chemically totally different, but when combined, they have a lasting smell and that's because in these dense rainforests in Madagascar where lemurs live, they need to signal males what space is theirs and sometimes there could be days in between when they scent mark an area and when another male comes by and smells it. They're things that you'll see if you watch a lemur in a zoo so they rub their chest, they rub their wrists together like this, like they're at a rave, and then they take their tail and they rub it up and down their tail and that's so that when they walk through the forest, the tail as it goes back and forth is kind of wafting the scent as they go. Which is also a behavior seen at raves. Is the scent wafting. The scent wafting, yes. So this is definitely a very important aspect of the lemur social structure and their social behavior and how they interact with other males. Yes, very important. And while we're all sort of being like a little reactive to how happy we are to be humans and not have to go through this, think of all the things that we do that are emulating this. We start out explaining perfumes and colognes and this sort of thing. There's body spray, there's certain shampoos that we pick for the way that they smell. There's lots going on with our sniffers that we don't realize. And then on top of that we just have how many things in your life have you labeled with your name on it? Oh, I almost never do this. But as I recall as a teenager I was planning to have one of those little relief labels, label everything. But yeah. Yeah, we like to keep our things ours. And that's all this is about, is saying this is my tree. This is my section of the forest. This is my fruit bearing plant. This is all my stuff. Oh yeah, so now it works. Now I'm thinking it works, which is the real jungle in which I go out into. Yeah, this is my binder. I do have a label on the binder. This is my coffee mug. This is my lunch. Even on the disposable Styrofoam cups for the coffee machine, I will write my name on it or something that signifies this thing belongs to me at least. Yeah. Just go like this. I wonder though, you know, taking this into the human level of behavior, what this means for women who wear too much perfume. Does that mean they're trying to claim the elevator? This is my elevator. Because sometimes they do, right? Right. You're like, I'll take the stairs. Okay, I don't. I won't go in there. Fine. It's yours. But so bringing it back to the lemurs, the next step of the study will definitely add chemically what the differences between these two substances are. If there are certain cases where the lemurs favor one over the other, the part that they didn't really talk about in the study was females responses to these smells. So these are all part of the equation. But it is very interesting to see that different scent glands in different areas of their body make completely different substances. I was kind of surprised at that. I assumed that different species or different individuals would have differences, but I did not expect that on one individual there would be all these differences. There's a layer of manufacturing about it too. It's as though I have acquired a booger from my nose, but I'm going to add a little earwax to it before I dispose of it from my finger. It's sort of one of those. It's really unrelated. I always assumed people who wear too much perfume either have been told that they have really bad breath or B.O. It's a masking. Not an attractive, not a claiming of territory or saying, look at me or smell at me. I don't think so. Or did someone tell them they smelled really nice one day? Oh, and now they just don't know when to stop. That could also be it. Or are there olfactory systems overloaded because they smell like perfume every day? Sort of like how people who are slightly deaf are loud talkers. What are you talking about? I think it's interesting that the compound in the chest goo is squalene, which is actually used in perfumes. That's right. I didn't mention that. We're actually rubbing ourselves with lemur goo. Speaking of perfume, Ambergris was in the news this week as well. I didn't bring that story officially to the news, but there are ways that you can tell if you have pure Ambergris or just maybe some dried out poop. Like it? Ambergris? No! Ambergris is often in perfumes and that's essentially whale vomit. But it's not exactly. I suggest you do your own research. It's fascinating. Squalene also, I feel like is practically an onomatopoeia. I love that word. Squalene. Anywho, the other story that I brought today was for World Laboratory Animal Day, which is coming up on Sunday. In anticipation of that, there was a study that came out this week looking at the temperature that we keep our lab mice at. Normally we keep laboratory mice I almost said mice. Laboratory temperatures. At laboratory temperatures, which is 20 to 26 degrees Celsius. There's a lot of reasons for that. The smell of keeping mice. You don't want bacteria growing too fast. Also, when you're working mice in a laboratory, you're often wearing a lot of layers and a mask and gloves. The researchers could be very uncomfortable otherwise if it was too hot. But if it was up to the mice, it would actually be around 30 degrees Celsius in that laboratory. A recent study looking at particularly cancer studies and studies looking at inflammation, they come out with a little bit different results if you keep the mice at the temperatures that they want to be at. Makes sense. Right, because they're spending more energy and eating more food trying to stay warm. It also changes their metabolism. It might change what their body is focusing on if you're trying to get them to fight some sort of illness. If they're spending too much energy keeping themselves warm, that could actually affect your study. So, the long and short of this is that it might be time for us to look at that as one of our variables overall. These studies are very good at making sure they're consistent with other studies but there might be something that we're missing especially when we're trying to extrapolate results of a study with lab mice to humans because we're usually pretty comfortable in our temperatures. We're good with clothes and heating and air conditioning keeping ourselves where we want to be in terms of body temperature. So, even if it's potentially trying to give these lab mice more options for bedding more stuff to make their nests out of to see if they can increase their nest temperature based on that there's a lot of ways that we could see what happens if we redo some of these experiments. I had this summer job in the orthopedics lab at UC Davis under Professor Neil Sharkey and they were practicing with a new tiny, tiny, super tiny needle for suturing that they were cutting the arteries of mice and then stitching them up. Well, they had an 18% survival rate until a young Justin Jackson whose desk happened to be by the cages of all the mice showed up and I found that like post surgery they were very sluggish like they would start to kind of go up because the food would be at the top of the cage the food pellets were loaded into sort of a tray through cagey tray that they'd have to reach up to the top of the cage to eat. So I started sort of opening it and putting the food down where they could reach it and so it was a 100% survival rate after that. Of course the study had nothing to do with the survival rate it was practicing with the needle all the animals were going to be destroyed anyway which I didn't realize at the time. But that was significant enough to completely change the survival rate of these mice was just getting the food post surgery to somewhere where it was more easily accessible. So, yeah temperature, all these things should sort of be looked at to see that you're not accidentally biasing your study. Well, this is something you know years ago, a decade ago people were really starting to look into the idea that the lab cages themselves that they were keeping the mice in were not enriched enough to actually keep the mice mentally healthy. That they were inadvertently putting them into isolation or into these sterile containers where there was nothing to keep them busy and so basically the mice went crazy and so there were all these mouse symptoms of schizophrenia and depression and anxiety and all sorts of human based psychological disorders researchers started to see these kinds of behaviors in mice and these are just mice held in standard laboratory conditions. So, there is a huge question that came out about I remember talking about it on this show about whether or not we could trust any of the behavioral data from mice that were kept in these conditions and so it started a whole movement to starting to look at this kind of stuff. So all the conditions, I mean it's you know. It's one of those situations where a lack of variables could actually be adding a variable because you're working with a living, functioning complex system that is an animal's body and life and you want to cut out all of the potential variables you could be adding in like enrichment, like different food like warmer or colder temperatures that could from one perspective that's going to confound some of your data but from another perspective maybe it's time to step back and figure out how to make a mouse in a laboratory most like a functional living animal that we're trying to test on. Yeah, well then you can't have them in the standard laboratory. Well, maybe you can. Maybe you can find ways but then of course that's going to add to your research budget because you're going to have to have one of your grad students is going to be spending almost all of their time making sure that your lab rats and your lab mice are enriched and healthy and is that just to euthanize them at the end? Then there's the question, is that biased to data because your lab mice had an enriched environment yeah we might say but this is closer to the real environment and therefore should be used but then your exponential success at survival rate to like mine was might have nothing to do with the surgery in my case the scenario I described with nothing to do with that whatsoever that the surgeries are being performed equally in both labs the one that doesn't have an intern whose hand feeding mice and what versus one that doesn't so that's a problem too. Yeah, so I think that this this article just kind of raises this very important question that maybe we need to take a step back and look at what the ideal environment for health studies on laboratory animals is not in terms of making the animals happiest because that's a whole separate conversation but in terms of making them a functional model for a human body how do we make this most functional analogous model for a human body and to have the mice at a temperature when they're not comfortable and they're constantly fighting to get warm maybe that's not the best analogous model for a human body It's a fascinating conversation to have I think. Well, next week we will be talking with someone from the Jackson Lab who works on developing and has no relation to Justin. Jackson Laboratory is involved in the development of lab mice for research situations so we'll be talking about the genetics of laboratory mice developing new strains of laboratory mice and also probably can talk about issues like this and how they potentially view them as they come up. So next week next week ready or not it's we're going to be covering that for lab animal day world lab animal day is next this Sunday, right so this is just a little preview for that Yeah Alright, Justin Oh, yes there are papers coming out of Panama currently exposing skeletons providing evidence for activities that have long been hidden no not the Panama papers related to offshore banking monkey business but papers generated from the expansion of the Panama canal which has been exposing fossils that science is seeing for the first time. Latest revelation is it comes to us from seven teeth that were discovered that are 21 million years old and these 21 million year old teeth belong to the first North American monkey chronologically the first back the oldest I suppose oldest North American monkey we've ever discovered North American because even though Panama is sort of South America-ish 3.5 million years ago Panama was solidly part of North America and not connected as it is today so stringently to the south they named the new monkey species Panamasibus transidus in honor of Panama the Latin language and the monkeys geological movement across the ancient seaway that once divided the north and south a team including Carlos Yarmelo staff scientist at Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, STRI published discovery online the journal Nature today so this 21 million year old teeth they were found in the last Cascades formation during a five year intensive fossil salvage project by fields of crews from STRI University of Florida and the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science so this is a pretty insane project this is Yarmelo he says I asked my boss for a million dollars to dig a big hole in the ground probably the boss was like you know that the Panamanian people voted for the Panama canal authority to spend 5.6 billion dollars to expand the canal and unlock the treasure trove for us containing this new monkey species and many other fossils so during this salvage project researchers would rush in behind engineers as they dynamite the steep canal banks they collected exposed fossils described locations before the eventual heavy rains and fast growing vegetation obscured evidence of the dramatic tectonic event that lifted the land bridge out of the sea to connect North and South America so lots of explosions scientists rush in they search furiously through everything looking for fossils anything they can find they came back out with so they think this panamasibus is related to squirrel monkeys and capuchin capuchin monkeys capuchin monkeys in South America little organ friends if you've ever seen other monkeys the kid little monkey the white face and then the body so cute before this monkey discovery all this evidence of movement of a mammal from South to North was about 8 to 9 million years ago and this is in the form of the giant sloths so this is the only I guess the monkey the earliest evidence of a mammal not of a monkey earliest evidence also evidence of a mammal going from South to North is the giant sloth previously that's the 8.5 to 9 million year old and it's sort of interesting because we do have this sort of idea that these monkeys all sort of evolved in isolation in South America and were kept from North America but this guy made it 21 million years ago so there wasn't a complete separation in that timeline so authors of this report suggest two explanations of why there hasn't been so much crossing the mammals from South America were more adapted to life in South America there's the forests there still sort of found in Panama and Costa Rica where is the rest of North America's climate forestation was completely different and the lack of exposed fossil deposits throughout Central America means the evidence of these dispersals has yet to just be revealed so we don't necessarily know everything just because there was this land bridge that was into the sea and now it's up again and it keeps moving around let's make more canals right we just need to go dig and we'll get more fossils totally a fossils identified so far includes bats, horses, squirrels small camelids turtles and ferocious bear dogs adorable ferocious too though you must remember if you're cute or something else more deadly it might be so we know that some mushrooms are deadly but we all like to maybe not everybody but sometimes you go to the grocery store, you get those cute little white button mushrooms you get them and then you maybe leave them in your refrigerator a couple of days and they turn brown and not so cute I mean they're still okay but they start to be not so fresh they get that not so fresh feeling the slimy mushroom yeah so interesting instead of eating them raw exactly but I've got some interesting crisper news related to the white button mushroom so researcher Yanong Yang a plant pathologist at Pennsylvania State University in University Park has used CRISPR-Cas9 to delete a little bit of the genome of the white button mushroom agaricus bisporus for the family of genes that encodes polyphenol oxidase otherwise known as PPO and this is the enzyme that causes browning and so they knocked out one of the six PPO genes and that reduced the enzyme activity by 30% which will keep the mushrooms from browning for 30% longer so that's cool as long as a mushroom that should have been chopped up and fried or put into the soup rather than sliced up into the fresh salad still tastes the same totally it's the same mushroom and they've just gotten rid of this enzyme this oxidizing enzyme that oxidates oxidates if it's sliming up like the browning mushroom does but I can't tell because it's remained white is my question no it helps it stay fresher it's staying fresher another question I haven't even gotten to the big but a boom I know but we're already busy usually when food starts to look gross or taste gross it's a signal of something so is it taking away the signal of it being maybe having some bacterial growth on it or some sort of rot or no it's totally okay it's just an enzyme that causes it to brown so when the enzyme is in exposed to oxygen to air over time it leads to browning normally the mushrooms if they're just sitting in the ground in their mushroomy fungus state attached to their mycelium still getting all their wonderful nutrients this enzyme does not come become activated but once you've taken the fruit that fruit is on its own so it's more like a flower that's wilting it's an elegance to that kind of okay that makes sense a flower that's wilting or it's the skin of the banana that's starting to go brown same idea same idea so anyway do you guys have any issue at all with the fact this is a genetically modified organism this new button mushroom genetically modified do you think anybody should care? no neither does the USDA the USDA regulatory system does not cover stuff like CRISPR-Cas9 it doesn't cover organisms that have been modified to have a gene deleted taken out by something there are other organisms food products that have been bypassed have gone through USDA and aren't regulated by them that have had other gene editing techniques like zinc finger nuclease or transcription activator like effector nuclease which is the talon system and Cas9 CRISPR-Cas9 falls into the same system because what's happened is they're not putting any other viral or plant or animal DNA into the mushroom it's not a furry mushroom it's just a mushroom that won't go bad it's a mushroom that will not be any genes into the environment that are unnecessary and I'm sure some people will be very upset about this because how dare we feed people for less money and have food more abundant and reduce food waste right because something like this would reduce food waste because it would last a little bit longer in people's homes and so people might be more likely to eat them as opposed to throwing them away if they're good for a day longer it is a bit of a first world problem with these genetically modified foods because it's there isn't, we can't reinvent freezing food to make it last longer and to transport it we're not going to have another boom of technology and agriculture we may with the efficiency of water but what we really need is to accommodate the doubling of the population over the next 60 years or whatever it'll be we need a way to feed people and the longer food can last and the more places we can grow it the better we will be able to keep the planet from starving for a good portion of the population from so while it isn't sensible to save food by taking those browning mushrooms by shipping them halfway across the country or the world to somebody who's hungry the fact that you can have them last on the shelf longer means that you'll have to buy less by taking those resources to other places the interesting thing about this is that the USDA developed its framework for regulating genetically manipulated organisms back in the 1990s so it's been a while since the guidelines were created and so these new gene editing techniques Tallinn the zinc finger nuclease CRISPR-Cas9 they're just not even really on the radar of the guidelines as they stand in the USDA so the question now is whether or not at some point the USDA might come back and revisit its regulations in light of the new technologies that are available so given that there are a lot of organisms that are being created for market that are going bypassing the regulatory mechanism at this point in time which actually seems fine because they're not putting things in that could necessarily be dangerous to people which is what people are really concerned about so it could be revisited at some point because the US is revamping the rules currently so I don't know maybe in the next 5 or 10 years we'll see something and then in other really cool CRISPR news amazing, amazing development published in nature one of the limitations to CRISPR-Cas9 is that it doesn't work well on single nucleotides it's really good at cutting out chunks of DNA and it's gotten with newer permutations of the technique it's gotten highly efficient at taking big chunks of DNA out and either putting something else in or just taking stuff out just to not being what they do like an entire gene for instance like we were just talking about in the button mushroom story but this new research out of Harvard University University researchers have adapted the method to use the Cas9 system to cut a single strand of DNA so CRISPR-Cas9 as it is currently cuts the double strand this only cuts the single strand and only replaces a single nucleotide and why is this important? this is important because people and diseases that we have that are genetically based from single nucleotide polymorphisms so a lot of human variation and the disorders that come from some of that variation are based on single nucleotides that don't work in a gene in the right way and so this is the potential direction for human therapeutic use for CRISPR-Cas9 so the results are perfect you know it's not as effective as it could have been they attempted this on a mouse model of Alzheimer's disease and they were doing this in cells in a dish and they were able to convert a mutation associated with a disease in 58% of the cells that they attempted it on without and this is the point that I don't get is without causing too many unintended changes and so it's like okay you might change the one that you want to change but what are the off-target effects of things that you didn't necessarily want to change and how big is that so I think that's a big thing they're going to have to work on a sufficient system in another test they were able to get it to work in 75% of their cells which is very high and as this article in The Verge states altering 75% of cells in a person might be enough to minimize the symptoms of some diseases so you might not get all of the cells but if you can get a majority of them in a mutation in a majority of the cells you might tip the balance so that people stop suffering from the disorder so it's a as researchers say this takes and changes CRISPR from being kind of like a big shovel going in and digging stuff out more of a scalpel it's going from being someone digging a ditch to a surgeon going in so this is a very interesting step big news I got to thank Chris Clark for sending me this link through twitter that was really great and I also wanted to thank Sarah Adams who wrote in on the button mushroom story and was wondering how the modified genes are legally different from others and I think I answered that question hey Justin iron eating microbes yeah so this is a pair of papers from University of Wisconsin Madison Geoscience Lab they're looking at a class of bacteria that use iron like most animals would use oxygen at the very very base level what takes place is there's a transfer of electrons biochemical reactions where in organisms whether bacteria or animal oxidize carbohydrates, electrons go places this is transfer of energy stuff that's what life is based on but they've known for a long time that there are certain bacteria that seem to just utilize iron and this is important for a couple of reasons they sort of drilled down on this and actually can now put it in this paper that they've isolated and they've been able to basically observe this this electron transfer into the cell as well as back out of the cell these bacteria can basically eat and breathe iron why this is such an interesting story though it has some implications yes for the beginning of life on this planet right and it has implications for the terraforming of something like Mars like this would be a perfect species to send there but iron is the most common element in the universe like this is the stuff this is the stuff that is everywhere this water everywhere knows there oxygen you got to get to the point of some blue green algae cyanobacteria whiffing away for hundreds of billions of years but if you have something that can eat and breathe and survive life survive on iron even in the absence of oxygen now you can take life to just about any solar system in the universe and that's why this is so fascinating that we know that they exist already we've known that they're there for hundred years but it's so interesting that those who have gotten interested in and drilled down on this actually they're gene biologists but really they're geologists and they were sending stuff to labs to have sequencing done on the bacteria that they were working with and it was just sort of a funny quote here eyebrows rose when we contacted the biotech center three or four years ago to discuss sequencing who are these people from geology and what are they talking about but we stuck with it and it turned into a pretty cool collaboration that has allowed us to apply their excellent tools that are more typically applied to biomedical and related microbial issues this is Professor Rodin who is the author on this so very we need to give up on the idea that we're going to find life just on an oxygen rich wet planet in a certain we don't need that anymore we can and it's very possible that this was even because we know there was life on this planet before we had the great oxygenation event right so there's that question of did life start earlier than what we think is the earliest date for life and if it did how could that have been possible I know there's evidence little tiny flecks of minerals in rocks that have been found very very tiny bits of evidence but that are suggestive of bacterial metabolism at a time when there shouldn't have been bacteria so the question is is it because of something like this that there was that we have this evidence is this iron iron metabolism is that part of it so I wonder if they've gone through all the steps to make sure that they absolutely absolutely know these are these iron chemo metabolizing organisms yes no other no other options for what they are right and it's actually two way apparently they can they can take in electrons from the iron they can pass in but then they also can pass them back out again which has an effect on the iron that they're devouring that sort of makes it then easier to devour later it's sort of an interesting process that shows that sort of it's able to utilize it a little at first and then utilize it even more later so this could be the first we could be sort of looking now at the first form of respiration first form of life utilizing its energy on this planet who knows but we already had bacteria before we had the oxygenation event so there had to be a way of doing this before and it continues to this day so I've always sort of joked about well if there's more than one way to form life how come we haven't seen it arise multiple times on the planet how come we only have one event and maybe it's just that one event is this simple is you know something that we see in little hot springs once in a while which is actually they got their microbes for the study this is I think they got them from Yellowstone and there's another study that pulled it from a hot spring in in Germany somewhere I think referred to as a ditch a ditch in Germany we went to a hot spring in Yellowstone and a ditch in Germany but the studies are online and applied environmental microbiology and in geobiology but it's you know it's far reaching life on earth possibly started in that form of life still with us or it's another way life has adapted to being able to spread into different niches being able to adapt to use a different kind of energy and even so if we understand the genetics of it we can potentially use it to start you know the terraforming of Mars or something right or yeah this is what we've been looking for or like somebody said very much earlier during our interview iron eating bacteria might be a poor idea to put on a spaceship right so just got to make sure you got the right material yeah I think the other thing about this that Justin kind of mentioned earlier is that we've been looking for these building blocks of life that we call it on all these other planets but what if none of that is actually necessary how are we even going to find it we're going to have to actually just go or send something to take samples that's finding or not finding these building blocks is not going to mean there is or isn't life is what we're learning essentially hey Blair do you have one more story sure so I've talked on the show before about ants that join all together to make a raft when it floods well it turns out that they have memory when it comes to this and always take the same spot when they're forming their rafts so they figure out what they're good at where they're best used on the raft and they always go back to that exact same spot in their cooperative feet for survival and the most interesting part of this to me is that there is not a huge death rate from the ants on the bottom there is a really high survival rate after they've rafted even including the ants that are in the worst positions of that raft so that suggests that being immersed in water at the base of the raft is not as deadly as we would have expected and a quote from the researcher is these elaborate rafts are some of the most visually stunning examples of cooperation in ants they are just plain cool although people have observed self-assublages in the past it's exciting to make new strides in understanding how individuals coordinate to build these structures so we've talked about teamwork in particular I always remember our crocodile study that I talked about where they all took different jobs well guess what ants specialize to even within their normal social structure they know where to go that's so great it's interesting for something like this where they're creating these rafts it is potentially a matter of survival as to for all of them to be able to create a raft that works and so to know where you're supposed to go to create a functional raft might be an important part of how it's all put together structurally the part of this that always bothered me before was I always just assumed the ants on the very bottom wouldn't make it and that it was part of this kind of for the greater good of the genome because most ants in a colony are somehow related so in theory hey I've got the rest of my buddies to the other side it was worth it but if they keep going back to the same spot in the raft every time that doesn't work unless they survive until the next time so the fact that they're surviving this that's what I really want to know is how are those ants not drowning on the bottom of the raft maybe they're so small and they have little bubbles of air around them yeah surface tension is a different beast when you're a different size Blair as an experiment next time you find an ant attempt to drown it and just see how difficult that actually is right right I hear you but it still seems like if they need to make a raft to not drown which is the whole point that their survival rate goes up when they're in a raft versus by themselves it still seems like you'd be weighed down or maybe the survival isn't for the individuals because ants they're not good on their own and a lonely ant is eventually a dead ant they survive as part of a social organism so creating the raft they at least ensure that other individuals will also survive mhmm that's true I like the chat rooms suggestion let's try this experiment with people see how they fare well that's what I was wondering if the ants are somehow just kind of like taking a breath every once in a while finding a way to surface I don't think ants breathe the same way they don't they have like little tuber cold thingies air in and out of their their ant breathing is a little different than the human but they still do breathe oxygen yes they do breathe through their antenna I'm sure you can drown an ant please don't try this at home yeah please don't that just sounds terrible way to treat the ant this player needs to do this for her own scientific curiosity I will not oh my goodness scientifically curious you made it to the end of the show everybody we've done it another show and I would like to take this moment to thank our Patreon sponsors thank you to Paul Disney Kevin Parachan, Keith Corsale, Steve Debell Melissa Mosley, Jesse Moreno, Patrick O'Keefe Jason Schneiderman, Rudy Garcia, Gerald Sarels Greg 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You can watch and join our chat room live but don't worry if you can't make it you can also find our past episodes at twist.org slash youtube and twist.org Thank you for enjoying the show Twist is also available as a podcast just google this week in Science in your iTunes directory or if you have a mobile device that is Android in Nature Twist for droid app is available there or simply this week in Science again anything Apple Marketplacey including the new Apple TV which as far as I'm concerned is still a unicorn. 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in science science I've got one disclaimer and it shouldn't be news that what I say may not represent your views but I've done the calculations and I've got a plan if you listen to the science you may just get understanding but we're not trying to threaten your philosophy we're just trying to save the world from jeopardy and this week in science is coming your way so everybody listen to everything we say and if you use our methods instead of rolling a die we may rid the world of taco plasma got the eye cause it's this week in science this week in science this week in science this week in science this week in science science 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 what we say is 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 this week in science this week in science this week in science is now time for the after showish kind of thing where we hang out for a little bit and we talk about the stuff my office is very hot right now very hot do you want to hear how ants breathe I was just going to look that up I was just seriously starting to type that into my search so I figured it out and I've now tweeted it out which I feel like I guess I forgot this biology class because this sounds so weird to me I don't remember learning this but I must have ants where did it go ants like all other insects don't have lungs they breathe through tiny holes in their sides called spiracles I said tubercles today is my day for not getting words right I meant to say transects with the interview earlier and I said parsec and so tubercle and spherical this is my day for being horseshoes on my vocabulary yeah so I tweeted out that whole disclaimer with cyanobacteria and then I was like well but everybody's calling it blue-green algae so okay but I'll point out that it's a prokaryot uh blue because it's really eukaryot is most algae so I was just going to be clever and do that but I still had the cyanobacteria cadence so I was like prokaryot prokaryot okay so we have there we have we have we have ants breathing through tiny holes in their sides through spiracles they have one pair per segment they lead into a network of tiny tubes called trachea permeating their entire body they get narrower narrower they supply air and hence oxygen to the tissues that use it rather than using blood I knew that ants didn't have blood okay though they can open and close their spiracles they have little ability to pump air in and out which happens just through general movement it's this inability that stops insects getting as big as us with our ultra-efficient lungs and blood okay so now I'm going to type in we had larger ant sex brown can ants drown what do we think hang on no I'm typing in something else yes I'm holding how long can that ant hold its breath underwater and fact that pops up most ants can survive around guess see how long would it take for the air to run out in the diffusion stop googling it I'm just thinking I'm going to say I'm going to say a minute or two okay I'm going to say an hour okay you're both woefully incorrect okay most ants can survive around 24 hours underwater 24 hours so there's the solution to our our ant so if you try to drown an ant it's not going to work so the rafts are probably not to keep from drowning but maybe just to not get separated from colony it's just to get more aboard you know maybe it's a little bit better buoyancy in groups or I also found this other part this other source that says that when an ant is drowned in a flood it can appear to be dead but if the water is allowed to evaporate and there's enough oxygen already flowing through the holes the ant can miraculously come back to life so that's the other part too is they could drown if they're pushed way far down in the water they run out of oxygen they absolutely could drown mm-hmm but it would take a long time and they would have to essentially not come back up which also could happen so it's possible that these ants could as a function of being separated be pushed under by a leaf or something and then yeah I would not have guessed the 24 hours I would have been probably a lot less than Blair might have gone I would have gone more than I would have put it in like five minutes or something like this but I can recall having seen what I thought now were drowned ants you know maybe in a planter or something like this but now I'm like maybe they were just you know waiting for the water to settle you know and just going to be ants again afterwards like that three ways to kill ants okay now you're following the dark side of the web hang on pesticides okay well that's just okay was the next one stomping on them I mean no one is apply pesticides directly to nests okay okay another is to apply pesticides another way and the page won't load now I think they're all pesticides I'm going to guess I think making a metal mold of an ant colony that might be one way uh-huh oh yeah yeah if you make a metal mold of an ant colony that probably would kill a few ants yeah yep those are amazingly cool looking things have you seen these no they will pour like I don't know aluminum or what it is down the hole at the opening at the top of an ant nest and then in a large volume of it like you know a big colander of melty aluminum pours down there and then they'll come back a few days later and dig it out and what they dig out is an object of art it is just gorgeous Kiki you have the ability to share such objects of which it is that I am describing the metal ant thingies yeah if you haven't seen these I mean I want one I don't know if I want to make one because I don't trust myself with a big colander of molten metal out in the woods or wherever I'd find this thing but the result is absolutely stunning gorgeous yeah here are a whole bunch of them oops that's not what I wanted to do I personally just got distracted by a link on I think it was mashable the things that people so these okay so what Kiki is showing now are ant colonies in metal form well one little ant they're beautiful aren't they some of them are pretty big too they're gorgeous structures yeah it can be massive poor ants are most of these upside down so oh good question probably yeah I think they are I think they look like trees they sort of look like kind of like trees I guess that's a way to explain it you'd think you'd have like one entry point to put the molten metal into and then it would float through and I think the basis of these is the metal that stuck at the surface like the pool of metal at the surface perhaps that's all I thought maybe they were upside down some of them that they're showing are upside down but there's people who've done YouTube videos of the whole process yeah I'm seeing that so do they try to kick all the ants out first or do you end up with ants in your metal I don't think there's any visible antage in molten metal I think they you think they all just burn up incinerate probably yeah is there any way to source your metal ant hill to make sure it was from an abandoned ant hill I want I'd like I'd like harm free until yeah oh my goodness yeah I do want that okay yeah yes then yes first we flooded it with with insecticide to make sure no ants would be harmed in the pouring of the metal okay I'm watching the two minute video it's pretty awesome I'm just going to watch it in here hahaha oh no no not my baby form a raft, form a raft quick it looks like it's a liquid you guys ants can't scream I mean maybe little tiny bits of air could escape through the little spiracles but we're just here yeah oh yeah oh my goodness and one of them sounds like Woody Allen of course yes you guys I think it's a joke I think there's that I found a joke someone tweeted about it and I think it's a joke it's got to be a joke witness what are you talking about what this is the part of the show that is not safe for children oh do you want to just put a link I'll just take my headphones off I'm not going to show a movie the question I'll put the link in the chat room that's a great idea there's a video not safe for children oh no I don't like it what are you talking about oh the first line I'm not listening to it I'm just watching it no I'm reading the first line of the article as my daughter would say what are you talking about something that's just it's somebody is creating a bunch of spoof product ideas for drones oh I just saw the link you put now I didn't even need to click on it you don't even need to click oh the video oh oh good gracious the things people spend their time on okay since you're wondering what I was searching for when I found it I wasn't searching for anything I just went to my twitter dashboard to just see if people had tweeted and there's a tweet from the brink institute that had this link and I just I'm scarred clickbait it was clickbait I clicked and then you shared the link in our chat room thank you I didn't show any of this to children on the video though and I'm keeping my mouth shut otherwise our chat room I hope is mostly grownups it's grownup children yup uh huh here I is believe me no one knows what to get Kiki for her birthday nope no oh if I wasn't already pink from the heat in this room it's not flush it's not flush oh my goodness the hamburger of the beer hahahaha oh my god I'm not a grownup either identity for so oh my goodness yeah right this is what I get for going to my twitter page all I wanted to know is if anybody had tweeted that I needed to respond to well I tweeted hashtag which I just learned what it meant recently today I learned you didn't know that now you know oh I knew something today I learned what TIL means I knew an acronym before a millennial that is so exciting yeah I guess I'm technically a millennial hahahaha I don't feel like it very often technically I'm gonna write that tweet right now hashtag TIL what hashtag TIL oh did you see the video today of the since you had the ringtail lemur story did you the video of the lemur that wanted to be petted that's part of the reason I reported on that story today lemurs are topical right now stop I need you to spread my scent well beyond my borders yeah so this one this one yes is I'm gonna it's just so cute these two little kids petting the lemur look it we're petting the lemur we're petting the nice little ringtailed lemur look at that and then we're gonna stop oops and there's an ad wait what are you doing you stopped okay pause it now now with the knowledge we gained from this earlier segment of the show what the lemur did was it used its wrist scent gland across its back to transfer that scent then to these two young boys who will then transfer that scent elsewhere yeah on a back rub it's just scenting scent landing for unsuspecting children I think that's what cats do too it's all about scent marking yeah well cats have the jacob it's gonna stop and then it's gonna use its wrist there it was using its wrist again there you go Justin and that's why you're on the show you make these amazing connections you know if it wasn't this show it would be a show talking about the stock market or aliens connections between things even if they're not there so the Jacobson's organ tell us about this Blair oh that's the organ in the olfactory organ in the roof of snakes mouths so some mammals also have that and cats are one of the ones and so that's why they will scent mark but the other thing is if a male smells a female in heat he'll do what's called a flemen face which is basically he'll go like this I know flemen they get their upper lip up to like accentuate the air going in and they try and get the air running over the top roof of their mouth right so on the roof of their mouth the Jacobson's organ and so basically so the way that we sense olfactory signals is that they're nasal turbinates so insider nose are these wrinkly surfaces that if we stretch them all out they'd make about the size of a postage stamp right I think I've talked about this on the show and then with dogs if you stretched it out it would make the size of a handkerchief and then if you did that with I think it's a grizzly bear it'd be the size of a picnic blanket so the surface area is how those animals accentuate their olfactory abilities but then other animals particularly when it comes to hormones other mammals will have the Jacobson's organ as well as their nasal turbinates to help them sense olfactory signals and then with snakes that's the only way they smell that's why they're sticking out their tongue all the time they're sticking out their tongue they're grabbing molecules and they're sticking that into the Jacobson's organ what's telling us is that cats are really snakes sure or it's convergent evolution or it's convergent evolution yeah likely story or they're furry snakes actually there's a lot of similarities between snakes and cats think about it both poisonous or can be so I loved my lemur story tonight because for years my lemur impression has been this which nobody understood until now was the lemur impression yeah we just had a problem so when I would give tours at the zoo I would always be like so lemurs they have these sencleans and they rub their wrists together and then they rub it on things I had people in my tour group that I didn't know so I would rub these on the banisters on the exhibit or something like that but then if it was people that I didn't know I would go like this but I would rub their arms you're marking people you're like yeah there's something in front of the camera I know I almost probably just destroyed my entire rig that's awesome you're a little bit of a cray there I was very excited to be a lemur hotrat says radio listeners are like what yeah I know so I realized after I did that which I was very excited to do my kind of dramatization sorry guys facts in the chat room says the cats do have rather snake like eyes you know and I just googled one page of snake eye one page of cat eye and if you go back and forth if you didn't know which category they were in pretty hard to tell challenge accepted only one has eyelids yes that's an important part of that in fact oh that's not look what I googled I googled snake eyes you got GI Joe I guess is that dressed on black yeah you did not know GI Joe lost his eyesight in Vietnam but was trained as a ninja so he relies on his other senses to enact ninja like attacks on cobra command okay because that's cobra command and yet he's snake eyes so I love how Google now has these like color coded search terms at the top so all of these are related all of these are like comic books and then Voldemort is here for some reason but then in blue is GI Joe, Naruto and Spongebob Spongebob snake eyes oh okay oh Google because Spongebob and cobra commander of course mega blocks I think Spongebob is a bad guy just like the cobra team Spongebob is so bad he's a great American hero yeah but he's not nice what do you mean he's not nice he loves everyone no he says terrible things he and his friends they're mean how dare you episode did you see that you think Spongebob is mean Spongebob is the most pure hearted nope I don't understand how you can dislike Spongebob he's the sweetest gentleman what no Spongebob okay I get the Squidward sometimes has problems with him but he has a heart of gold he can be annoying specifically the Squidward and to his boss the Krusty Krab Mr. Krabs he only means well he only wants to make it a perfect Krusty Burger well there was a let's see Hot Rod Spongebob is what behind the air is nice there was a study saying that Spongebob and other shows similar to it were bad for child development there is I'm not sure what you really do learned there are some you don't learn anything that's definitely true you learn that you can light fire underwater yeah squirrels can live in underwater air aquariums yeah yeah starfish don't have brains though you can learn that it's not a good show it's a great show it's hilarious I loved it I loved it when I was in high school when it first came out I think I liked it because I wasn't watching it as like a little kid no I think it's fine for people who are older or older kids younger kids it's not appropriate it is kind of violent there's lots of more not adult but there's more mature content in it sometimes I think the first two seasons were such like a hipster thing to say I think the first two seasons were very like pure and a lot of them had like morals to them a couple of my favorite episodes had very clear morals about like maintaining open lines of communication and always being kind and all these kinds of things and then yeah things got real real wacky and I'm fine with wacky but don't say that it's a hipster it is a kid's show but I think it teaches kids something to really learn from other shows which is there's a little bit of irony and sort of reaping what you sow that comes through from all of them there's a definite there's a definite what is it action and consequence the way that the plots unfold nothing just unfolds because it unfolds if somebody takes actions sometimes selfishly selfishly that then end badly for them or everyone else even after a small game was for a moment achieved so that's a common thing not that I've watched that many episodes but hey huge fan of Daniel Tiger right now my almost three year old is now singing Daniel Tiger songs involved with like potty training cleaning up toys and stuff like Daniel Stripe a Tiger from Mr. Rogers was from Mr. Rogers but he's got his own show now he has his own show there's a cartoon Daniel Tiger is great yeah and there's lots of everything in fact me and my older daughter sometimes mock how there's a song for everything by doing the Daniel Tiger type song for just any banal task that's funny would you pass the song like like we kind of made fun of it but my youngest one has this whole like will recite the song involved in potty training and washing your hands and picking up toys and like all these things that's a positive seriously positive kids show they got that one down there I still will make sound effects for things that I do circa Pee Wee's Playhouse I loved Pee Wee's Playhouse those are my favorites I loved Pee Wee's Playhouse when you say loved do you mean to indicate that you have stopped watching it because I certainly haven't oh no I still won't oh yeah I saw the new one yeah the new one the Playhouse and I honestly I honestly only just only just realized that oh gosh Cowboy Carl what's his name Cowboy Curtis is Mobius not Morpheus Morpheus whatever you can't nerd out about these things and then get both the names wrong I know but I only just figured it out and I'm like oh yeah that's Cowboy Curtis that's I didn't Morpheus oh my god Dave is putting a puff and stuff in the chat do you know who sings the theme song the beginning of Pee Wee's Playhouse Magic Screen no Magic Screen does not sing the theme song he just says welcome to Pee's Playhouse Pee sings it doesn't he oh no oh it's that kid you're right you're right oh is it Cindy Lopper it is Cindy Lopper not credited as Cindy Lopper but it's totally Cindy Lopper alright I'll be back if you are still here Bill Catharal I'm gonna need to get going I'm dying of heat in here open windows and get some stuff taking care I love this I love this idea of checking out this bee vlog guy I can't wait to get updates from Blair in the Mojave Desert well I will go that's gonna be fun I almost went out there just for fun with some of my friends that did the original class with me recently we were gonna rent the same dorm areas in Zizix, California it's pretty great catch desert iguanas but the problem is if you just go out there for fun and you don't have permits you can get in trouble can't you claim that you're looking for asteroid fragments or something be looking for rocks maybe or you can get a fishing permit which actually lets you take certain things it's pretty funny I gotta go good night good night Kiki, good night Blair I will see you this time next week yeah and Sunday is World Laboratory Animal Day Friday is Earth Day and take a moment Friday to stop smell of flower and if you're in the San Francisco area come to Earth Day at the San Francisco Zoo on Sunday there are all sorts of events all over the place plant a tree that is the Earth Day organization is trying to plant trees it's five years now until 2020 is the fifth or the 50th Earth Day anniversary I'll be hoping to sell a car you'll be hoping to sell a car they're very good very good first we just try to have a job alright good night everybody good night thank you for watching everyone have a good one then I click the button and then