 Do not know who. This is TWIS. This week in science, episode number 609, recorded on Wednesday, March 8th, 2017. Happy International Women's Day. I am Dr. Kiki, and tonight on TWIS, we will fill your heads with less sex, panda colors, and troubling sinks. But first. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. The following hour of programming would not be possible without women. Not only is it created, owned, produced, and managed by a woman, but two of the three hosts are women. And the one male host on the show was raised by, you guessed it, a woman. More than one, in fact. And while women are being recognized for all the wonderful things they do this woman's day, I'd like to take a quick moment to speak on behalf of all men. We get it. Some of us are the worst people ever. And those of us that intend to get it right, often don't. But please, don't give up on us. We don't always understand. We don't always make the effort to understand. But don't give up. Don't give up. And please, don't be patient with us either. Patience was tried valiantly in the past. It doesn't work. Your patience is always viewed by us as acceptance. Do not accept the status quo. Do not suffer fools. And make all mankind better by your being heard. Right here on This Week in Science, coming up next. I've got the kind of mind that can't get enough. I want to let all up with new discoveries that happen every day of the week. There's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek. I want to 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. Good science to you, Kiki and Blair. And good science to you, Justin, Blair, and everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of This Week in Science on International Women's Day, the day that Blair and I are supposed to be on strike. But I did some thinking about it. And I thought, I've been running this podcast for a really long time. I really enjoy it. And it helps people. We're bringing science to people. Not only that, it's part of my entrepreneurial efforts. So female business owner who talks about science to lots of people on the internet, I'm here to represent. Yeah. And that's what I'm doing. I hope Blair, you're here to represent, too. And of course, you'd be working out on an underling. I mean, it's not only that it has the same impact when the boss doesn't show up to work. You know, they're like, oh, oh, yeah. No, I knew she was important. That's when I hired me to work here. Like, that's, you know, I think the business owners all get a pass. I think what happened in this day? Yeah. But I think, you know, I tick several buttons off, you know, little checkboxes, female, scientist, communicating, educating, business owner. Absolutely. Hey. So I'm here for all women and all people. Yeah, you've come a long way. Don't go home early. I'm not going home early. We are here to talk about science. Yes, we have. We have a great show today. Lots of science ahead. I brought stories tonight on research done by women. So there we go. That's what I'm really working on. From Neanderthals to Bones to DNA storage to sex. Women worked on all the science I'm going to be bringing to the show tonight. So what did you bring, Justin? Oh, my gosh, what do I have? I have molecular leaves, fishy forefathers, and creating a time crystal. Ooh, time crystal. Is that like time bandits? Oh, that's a great movie. Oh, that movie. No, OK. Maybe it'll lead to that. We'll talk about that a bit later. Blair, what is in the animal corner? Oh, I brought some panda news. I brought a little bit about elephants using new technology. And I brought some nightmare juice. I can always count on you for that. Yay. Yay. The crowd cheers. Yay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right, you guys. Let's dive in. We've got some fun. Fun stuff. So first off, I wanted to share some research published by Elsevier out of Europe. Looking at the research publication rate, looking at differences between men and women in publications and in citations of those publications. I figured, hey, this is a science show. It's Women's Day. Let's talk about this study, which was released today by Elsevier. They looked at female researchers and male researchers from the time periods of 1996 to 2000 and 2011 to 2015 between 12 different countries. So what they found is that across everything, female scholarly articles are cited and or downloaded at similar rates to the articles published by men. But women tend to publish fewer articles than men on average. So even though women are catching up and publishing research that is making an impact, they're not publishing as much impactful research. Specifically here in the United States, let's see, general trends. Let's see. Specifically here in the United States, we find from 2011 to 2015, women's research tended to be downloaded and cited slightly higher rates than men, generally for all the countries and regions. They found that women are generally less internationally mobile than men and are less likely to collaborate internationally on research papers. There are lots of things you could speculate about here, but that is one interesting finding. Health and life sciences fields of research have the highest representation of women, while physical sciences are still dominated by men. And women are slightly less likely than men to collaborate across academic and corporate sectors on research articles. So that kind of interdisciplinary collaboration is not really happening for women as much as it is for men. Between 1996 and the year 2000, these countries that were studied, only one country had a female researcher population that was higher than 40%. Can you guess? Just think of a country and go, yeah. Scandinavian. I'm going Scandinavian. OK, it's a very good guess. I ran. Portugal. Portugal. Portugal was the only country out of the 12 that were studied that had a female researcher population higher than 40%. However, by the period 2011 to 2015, nine countries out of the 12 had reached that 40% mark and possibly gone over it. And these are Australia, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, European Union, France, Portugal, stayed up there, the United Kingdom, and the United States. So there are positive gains being made. The remaining countries that have less than 40% female researchers are Chile, Mexico, and Japan. So just very interesting finding. And we can't really talk much about what is keeping the collaboration, holding women back from collaborating and publishing more. But gains are being made. That's fantastic. Way to go, ladies. Way to go, ladies, right? And what researchers think is that the pipelines are being filled more. And so activities that are driving STEM engagement for women and girls globally are starting to have an effect. And so continuing those efforts are hopefully going to continue to write the disparity in the STEM industries. Sort of like what happened with Title IX, right? You started forcing schools to give athletic programs to girls. And all of a sudden now they're taking home more gold in the Olympics. Whereas at the time Title IX was instituted, the women weren't really that in the Olympics. You didn't really see a lot of it. So these things do take time. And the wave is out there. It's moving through. It's moving through the population. More and more young women are applying themselves to the sciences and giving access to it. So really beautiful. And I was reading recently the National Center for Science Education. We've had someone from there on our show before that they've done a lot of research on how children in classrooms, how they picture a science, they have the kids draw, right? And so usually it's an old man in a white lab coat, right? But they have seen a change, especially after they bring scientists into classrooms to speak with children, that then the pictures become a lot more diverse. There are men and women. The lab coats suddenly start to disappear. So the more we tell our kids, the more they're able to see themselves in other roles that before maybe they would have seen close to them. So this is really exciting. Yeah, it is. It is very exciting. Good news, good news on this International Women's Day. And thank goodness for the women entering the research funnel. If it were not for the next couple of female researchers, we might not have the results that I'm about to let you know about. Neanderthals. You love the Neanderthals story, right? Thank goodness Neanderthals didn't floss. Really? Pruelly. Yeah. So they had hunks of food in there so we knew what they were eating. So not just hunks of food, but little tiny pieces of food stuck in the plaque, and little tiny molecular bits that just kind of get in there. And we brush our teeth, maybe you've got a sonic error or you floss your teeth and you get rid of that material. And the material actually can trap food in it. And then the calcification is something that preserves the food. And we have found can be molecularly investigated. And so paleo microbiologist, Laura Wayrich, at the University of Adelaide in Australia, looked at this material to get an idea of our, of not, I mean, my, I guess, distant relatives, ancestors, diets. And she looked at, and her team looked at teeth from teeth and jaw fossils from Spy Cave in Belgium and the El Sidron Cave in Spain and a cave in Italy known as Bril Grotta. So these are all Neanderthal finds for sure. And very interesting results. Basically they found bits of food in the plaque, bits of DNA that could be identified to organisms that were eaten. And what was eaten changed, differed, based on the region that the fossils were found in. So Neanderthals who lived in Spy Cave in Belgium, they found DNA that was similar to modern rhinoceros and sheep. And so from that they've deduced that they must have eaten woolly rhinoceros and a type of wild sheep called a mouflon that were in that area around 36,000 years ago when those Neanderthals were there. The woolly rhino of Belgium. The woolly rhino. What did you call it? A mouflon? A mouflon. That is gonna be my firstborn's name, I think. A little mouflon. My little mouflon. Mouflon, Basterich. Right. And they also found DNA in those Belgian Neanderthal teeth that was similar to a mushroom we now have called cupronopsis scenario, which is a gray shag mushroom that is known to be edible. This is, yeah. Shag mushroom. Gray shag mushroom, yes. Now the difference to the Spanish Cave is large. So they found that this cave, the Neanderthals have been dated to about 10,000 years, earlier 48,000 years ago as opposed to 38,000 years ago, they didn't find any animal, large animal DNA. What they found were lots of nuts and moss and edible, more edible mushrooms. And then this also comes along with evidence that suggests that they may have these Spanish Neanderthals may have been eating particular types of food for medicinal purposes. So they found some evidence in, there's a different finding. One of the drawbacks of why we have this research. One of the drawbacks of not having brushed your teeth. It's allowing us the insight. I know. It wouldn't help in the future. They would never know what we were eating, right? From our teeth. So in 2012, researchers did a dental plaque analysis from these El Sidron Neanderthals. And they found evidence of bitter plants that these Neanderthals had been eating very bitter things. And so they floated this hypothesis that it was maybe for appetite suppression or some other medicinal use. And Weyrich's team found traces of poplar which actually has salicylic acid in it, better known as aspirin. And the individual who they found this in, who's the, I think they're the only individual they found it on. You gotta check the rest of the bones to find out what kind of arthritis they were dealing with, right? No, they had dental abscesses. This is also like why we know this is because they had really bad dental hygiene. Bad teeth. And because of that, they had to seek out medicine to compensate for the pain. Yeah, and another thing a bit of DNA they found was for penicillin, penicillium bacterium. So, you know, penicillin very well as an antibiotic. And so maybe aspirin and this bacteria which they might've found moldy food, right? Oh, I'll eat the moldy food. It gets rid of my dental abscess. We don't know for sure if that's what they were doing but the evidence is mounting up. Yeah. Yeah, interesting that it's only in the individual which they could tell had intestinal parasites and this visible dental abscess in the jawline was the one who was eating the poplar and the penicillin mold. Like it wasn't present in the other ones. It was only in the one that was really sick which does indicate like that was a concerted effort to do some sort of, you know, healing. And we go, oh, how could they know about medicine? Well, you know, they had 500,000 years of eating moldy foods and plants to figure this stuff out. We haven't even nearly had as long and granted we have all of medicine. Yeah, so, I mean, that's, we think of, you know, we think of people like Neanderthals. We think of, I don't see a people but we up a people like the Neanderthals or early hominids as very basic, you know, not, we don't even know if Neanderthals had language, right? We've been arguing about that, but it seems that, you know, they were around for a very long time and probably had this ability, had discovered things about foods in their environment. You know, and maybe these L-sidrone Neanderthals were way ahead of the Belgian ones, right? But you'd have to find, you'd have to find a severely ill one from Belgian to see if they were applying medicine. Cause this one, based on the plaque, they could tell it had this parasite that caused diarrhea and it also has this abscess. And this is where we see things that could potentially be medically helpful to that individual in the plaque. We'd have to find another sick Neanderthal somewhere and see if those same medicines in a different region were being applied. How long have Neanderthals been doing this? How spread was this knowledge? Yeah, and one thing that people have been passing around about this story also is this evidence from these Neanderthal teeth kind of flies in the face of the paleo diet. It goes to show that the individuals, Neanderthals in this particular case that were alive during this late part of the Paleolithic era, had a very varied diet. Lots of protein, but also lots of carbs, so. Trust no diet. Exactly. What you need is Paleo Microflora, which we're working on, we'll find it one day. Trust no diets, except for this one that I'm really into, says Justin. And then my final intro story has to do with hospital sinks. Ew. Yeah, so do you guys know what a pee trap is? Nope. Yes, that's the little bit under your sink that goes down and then back up again, which you would think is very inefficient for getting wastewater out of your sink, but it creates a plug basically so that air can't come from the sewer and back out up your sink. Exactly. Yes, so it's a water plug so that you don't smell the sewer in your bathroom. It's awesome. Interesting. Yeah, so researchers thought, pee trap, there's just water sitting in there. That little U-shape part of the drain, that has a bunch of water in it, right? What a moist, yummy environment for bacteria to grow. And they were thinking specifically of hospitals where individuals come in with terrible infections and then doctors dump things down the sinks and they wash their hands and they... What is potentially happening to those bacteria? Are they capable of setting up a population there in the drain and climbing back out? No. No. Yeah, I thought Blair was gonna bring the nightmare juice. I don't like it. Well, the answer is, yeah, they can climb right back out. So researchers set up a fake sink situation. They had five sinks and they were separated by plexiglass. The first sink, they inoculated with E. coli bacteria down in the drain and then they waited a little bit and they checked to see how far it spread, especially if they used water splashing. Like if you were washing your hands or dumping down the sink, there's water that splashes back out. And so they set up a bunch of Petri dishes around the sink to try and figure out whether this E. coli was making it back out the sink. And this E. coli had been specially modified to glow green under UV light. So it's fluorescent bacteria, so they could just pass a black light over these Petri dishes after a couple of days to figure out whether or not the E. coli had set up shop. And lo and behold, ta-ta, yes they had. E. coli easily spread from the first to at least the third sink with a very moderate inoculation of bacteria and with a very heavy inoculation of bacteria in that sink, it made it all the way down the row. So even with the plexiglass in between, the E. coli was spreading through the sinks, climbed out of the p-trap using a biofilm. And so we've talked about biofilms before which is basically the bacteria all joining together and making a happy coating on surfaces. Yeah, happy. Yeah, and the biofilm actually protects individuals within that population. And so the biofilm is able to creep up the drain. So what are we gonna do about this? What can we make that is not a p-trap? The E. coli is coming from in the house. Yeah, how can we fix this, especially in hospitals? Yeah, and so that is the big question. They don't know necessarily what the best methodology will be to fix this. I'm assuming bleach. Or just run the water for an extra minute after you've washed your hands. Exactly, running the water, not dumping things so that they splash into the sink as if there is something already populating your drain. It could allow it to spread out. What about, close the sink in between so that you didn't need like an airtight closure, but then I suppose E. coli could live on that too, probably. Yes, yeah. So the question is, does the design need to change? Is there something design-wise that should change or is there something procedural that needs to change to ensure that super bug infections don't get spread from the sinks that are supposed to help us clean them? Ooh, I know, antibacterial coating on the inside of the pipes, right? So the biofilm can't grow. The pokey service, you know, like on the insect wings that we talked about, the super pokey surfaces. The surface itself is antibacterial so it's not chemically treated. But you can do- It makes the inside of pipes like that. We could just make them copper. Or silver. Copper piping. Any of those? Copper. We already use copper piping. No, we don't. No, we use plastic piping. Plastic now. Everywhere now. Yeah. Copper. Which is unsanitizable to an extent. Yeah. Or I wonder if you just had the P-trap further away. Although it's just a matter of time. It's just a matter of time. It's coming and breathing. Yeah. But this study was led by a researcher. I love her title. She's a molecular epidemiologist. I just, I think that just sounds so neat. Studying epidemics at the molecular level. Amy Mathers, you've got a great job. Good work. This is a great, great story. Hot rod in the chat room says, double P-trap. That sounds like double the E. coli, if you ask me. Yeah. All right, I'm done with my intro stories. This is This Week in Science. Justin, what you got? An international team of scientists have created a molecular leaf. Chemist engineered a molecule that uses light, electricity to convert the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide. A carbon neutral fuel source more efficiently than any other method of carbon reduction. This is led by Liang Xi Li at Indiana University supporting the Journal of the American Chemistry Society. So if you create, this is a quotey voice. If you create an efficient enough molecule for this reaction, it will produce energy that is free and storable in the form of fuels, Li said. That is a major leap in that direction. So they had been before working on solar panels using this sort of working with graphites and carbon-based materials to collect solar energy and then send it somewhere so it could be stored, kind of started trying to figure out a way to get rid of the middleman. So creating something that could actually just drive the reaction of creating a fuel source right there in the panel. And that's kind of where they're at. It's in a liquid form. So they haven't done this to where they can, you know, put it on anything outside yet. They're working with some cheap materials. The main material is the same thing in pencil lead. Some of the other materials are a little harder to get their hands on. But basically what they're doing is creating energy from the sun releasing the solar power. The big breakthrough here is his method, this molecule is being able to be absorbing, is absorbing a larger array of sunlight to do this reaction. Previously, they've only been able to do it with a very tiny sliver of infrared unseen light. Now they've got it over a much larger spectrum. So it's becoming more and more efficient. Basically it's a two-part system. They have a nanografin, which is an energy collector that absorbs energy from sunlight. And an atomic rhenium, which is the engine that produces carbon monoxide. The energy collector drives a flow of electrons to the rhenium atom, which repeatedly binds and converts the normally stable carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide. So both creating a fuel and sort of cleaning the air like a leaf would do. And because it's converting it from the carbon dioxide to carbon monoxide, it's a more usable form. It's a usable form of energy, yeah. That's pretty cool, that's pretty cool. I mean, anything that we're able, I mean, at any point, if we're able to take CO2 emissions and make them into usable products, usable fuel, usable things to be able to... I mean, there's so much CO2 coming out of, coming out of so many industrial processes, coming out of energy production processes. And if we can manage that and use the sunlight, use sun to make it happen. And the idea I think extended out is, I mean, you could, of course, anything that's being done in the lab right now along this line, you could simply plant a tree and it would be a better carbon sink and you might be able to get more energy out of the tree. But we're talking about something that you could essentially, eventually, do that painting onto a building. So the building itself is acting like a leaf along all of its surfaces and creating its own energy to power the building and the lights within. So more steps in that direction, free off-grid energy. Yeah, but the big thing that we always have to think about when it comes to materials like this is, okay, that's awesome, but how easy is it going to be to actually manufacture? And how easy is it going to be able to take, take it out of the lab and actually make it at a quantity that's big enough to really be usable? Right, and when you were born, computers took up warehouses and they didn't do anything near what you can put in your pocket. So, I mean, yeah, this is still that stage. This is still the warehouse computer. And they're saying someday you'll be able to have one of these 10,000 times more powerful and it'll fit in your family garage, which, you know, it might even be able to do better. So we'll see. Yeah, very cool. Is it that time? What time is it? It's time for Blair's Animal Corner. Great at slow. Five pets, little pet. No pet at all. Wanna hear about his animals? She's your girl. Except for giant pandas at slow. That a no dapler. I have pandas. Why on earth would you have pandas? Oh, great question. So, interesting question was posed by University of British Columbia. Nope, by University of California, Davis, and California State University, Long Beach. Sorry. The next one is by University of British Columbia. I got confused. So this story, UC Davis and CSU Long Beach, they were looking at the patterns of pandas which are actually quite unusual. And I never really stopped to think about it, but it's true. There aren't really other animals out there with color blocking like pandas have. Well, I mean, you can talk about like our cats and our dogs. Yeah. Raccoon? Oh, raccoon. Red panda? So this is stark differences between the two colors, black and white, and they are in these giant segments on their body. So these researchers, a team of five scientists, three of them women, looked at the potential camouflage structure of a panda. Why on earth would you want giant sections of your body to be both black and then other areas to be white? Usually when you have an animal that is trying to disrupt their body shape, they are striped or spotted or camouflage colored or they're somehow splotchy. This is not something that we normally see. So what these researchers did was they assembled a team to assess the panda's coloration bit by bit. So they actually compared different regions of panda fur to 195 other carnivore species and 39 bear subspecies. The 39 bear subspecies obviously related to the giant panda. Then they tried to match the darkness of the regions on their body to ecological and behavioral variables to determine their function. That's a very fancy way of saying that by comparing them to other animals, they were able to find out, okay, the white parts help them blend in with snow and the black parts help them hide in the shade. So the re... Go ahead. But then they're like in the forest. Yeah. They are not all shaded with the background. So they're gonna be standing out partially and hiding partially. Yeah, so they're just, they're kind of halfway in it in both situations. The problem is the panda as a flawed bear, which I'll explain more about in a moment, means that they have to withstand the whole opposites of conditions and they are not equipped to change their habits or their appearance. So for example, let's look at the Arctic fox, right? They spend part of the year white. They spend part of the year gray. They do that by completely shedding fur and growing in a new coat. The panda remember as a flawed digestive system. So their digestive system is for meat, but they sit there and eat bamboo all day, which means that they can never get enough energy from their food because they just don't have an upset stomach and they're not processing their food correctly all the time, which is why they're just constantly eating bamboo. So they can't store enough fat. They can't store enough energy to change over their fur and they can't store enough fat to do what other bears do when it gets snowy, which is go into torpor, go into winter sleep, AKA hibernation, right? So they can't do that because they don't have enough fat stores to hibernate. So they have to be active year round. They have to travel around trying to find bamboo. And that means that they are during a year spending time in snowy mountains and tropical forests. So they have to deal with these different territories. And so this comparative research suggests that these different blocks in their body help them in different habitats. Their head, however, is a completely different story according to this research. They think that the head is actually used for communication. The dark ears are supposed to convey ferocity, a warning to predators. The dark eye patches are most likely to help them recognize each other because everyone's are slightly different. So this is preliminary research. Again, it's comparative research. This is what they've come up with. They scored thousands of images. They used about 10 areas per picture, 20 possible colors, and they used science. They used real science to do this comparison and collect data on what most likely these areas are used for. Now I think it's time to take this research into the wild and watch Panda behavior and see their interactions with other animals to see if this is effective. I think that's really what we would need to see to see if this is actually what it's being used for. But it is a question that we haven't really seen answered before. I hate it. Why does the Panda look the way it does? Yeah. Why Panda? Probably does also have some sort of ancestral roots to it as well. If you looked at it today, the alien anthropologist would be, the Panda has configured itself to look adorable to humans and therefore is preserved in zoos everywhere. Like, you know, like, yeah. But there aren't any bear relatives that look like that. So it's hard for us to look at it and see an ancestral root. No, I mean, too. I mean, ancestral, like where its previous conditions had been, like what it was doing. I don't know what preys on pandas. I don't know how humans didn't kill them all off with, like, giant ground sloths. I don't know what eats pandas either. My understanding is nothing. Yeah. So what's there to hide from? Well, maybe they're just hiding really well and that's why nothing eats them. Well, that could be. That's a question. I just posed questions. There we go. So that's my Panda. Now I want to talk about elephants using Fitbits. Elephants using Fitbits. Are they getting their 10,000 steps a day? Oh, you bet it. So recent research from the School of Anatomical Sciences at Witt's University and University of California, Los Angeles, they went to Elephants Without Borders in Botswana and they tried out a new research system using the technology in Fitbits to monitor elephant sleep. There's a couple things going on here, so let me unwrap this for you. So first of all, Fitbits can be altered to respond to elephant movement. So first, they watched elephants for a long time. They recorded trunk movement over a very long period of time. They recorded what their trunk was doing at different times, what it was like when an elephant went to sleep. And then they were able to, based on that, calibrate this Fitbit or something related to the Fitbit from the same company that makes Fitbits. And then they implanted this device into elephant trunks. They so far have done two matriarch elephants. And they found that if a trunk is still for about five minutes, the elephant is usually asleep. So just as Fitbit can record how much and how well you sleep, now this thing in the trunk can monitor elephant sleep. And we found that elephants are super fidgety. Yeah, so then the other side of this is that we wanna know what's up with elephants so we can help preserve them so we can learn more about them. We also just want to learn more about the nature of sleep. We've talked a lot on the show about different possible benefits of sleep and different types of sleep, REM sleep, saying that sleep helps us store memories, that sleep could help us heal, all these sorts of things. But we don't actually know for sure what sleep does, what kind of sleep is best and how much sleep any specific species needs. All this information is still kind of a mystery to us as much of research as we do on sleep because it's obviously something we care a lot about, right? I love my sleep. Don't we all? And so the expectation was that larger animals need more sleep because they need more energy because they have bigger brains. All these things lead us to believe that perhaps larger animals need more sleep. And so that was kind of the basis of this, wanting to see how much sleep an elephant needs because at this point we're not sure. Elephants in zoos, they have been recorded to sleep for around four hours a day and they can sleep standing up or lying down. But this new research of these two matriarchal elephants shows us that they sleep about two hours a night in the wild. Can you imagine? Why? Why do they need less sleep? Or is it just being in the wild? Yes, so this comes back to something I've talked about a few times on the show. Guys, living in the wild is tough. That might sound like a silly thing to say. That might sound like an obvious thing to say. People think a lot of the time that animals would rather be free out in the wild. It's the greatest place in the world. Well, it's a struggle. Being an animal out in the wild is a constant struggle for survival. And so it looks like that's what this is about. Especially if you're talking about matriarchs, they are the head of the group. They are trying to keep everyone safe. And so these guys, they sleep standing up, lying down about two hours a night. But lying down to sleep only happened every three or four days and only for about an hour. And so that means they're only having REM sleep or dreaming sleep every three or four days. And so remember earlier I said recent studies have shown us that REM sleep is thought to be important for storing and consolidating memories and sorting out unnecessary memories, cleaning out your memory bank. But that can't be true because everyone knows elephants have really, really good long-term memory. So as far as the elephant goes, REM sleep can't be that important. What's more, they found, that elephants were easily disturbed and awoken by things like predators, poachers, another elephant. They could go with no sleep for up to 48 hours. And sometimes when they got disturbed in the middle of sleep, they would walk up to 30 kilometers from where they heard the disturbance before going back to sleep. So there's so much going on here. Elephants don't get a lot of sleep. The REM sleep is not that important. They are easily awoken. And what's really interesting is that they didn't sleep when we would expect, when the sun goes down. They didn't wake up when the sun goes up. They seemed, their sleep pattern seemed unrelated to how much light there was out. So they just always slept kind of in the very early hours of the morning for a few hours. It was dark when they went to sleep. It was dark when they woke up. They were unaffected by those things that we thought had an intense impact on circadian rhythms about when to sleep and when to be awake. So again, this is just, this is a sample size of two. So I want to remind us of that. Sample size of two, two but three arcs. But we already know from zoos that they really don't sleep that much anyway. So it's, this is additional interesting information. More study needed. Lots of study needed, but this is definitely, this is cracking open a whole area of kind of studying sleep that it's, it's ruining some theories and it's positing some new theories. There's a lot going on here to unpack just from this one study with two elephants. And this is also a really good use of new technology. I'm really fascinated to see that we can take something like the Fitbit that humans use, whether or not they actually help people get fit or lose weight or not. I just hear lots of people going, yep, gotta get my steps in. But we're using that technology that's been so successful to help learn about and potentially conserve species. So that's pretty cool. I think it's very cool. Thanks for that story. I love it. It's got everything. It's got sleep, elephants, brains, conservation. Technology. Technology. It's got everything. It hits me. All the things, checks all the buttons. That's right. All the boxes. Okay, everybody. I think it's time for us to take a very short break. So, if you're interested, we've got more science coming in just a few minutes. We've got lots more DNA storage, time crystals. Oh my God, I can't wait for that one. This is gonna be so much fun, you guys. So stay tuned. We will be back in a couple of moments with more this week in science. Hey, everyone. I do hope you're enjoying the show so far. But while you're listening or while we're taking the break, why don't you head over to twist.org? You know, we've got our show notes over there. So all the links to all the stories that we've been talking about will be at twist.org for this week's episode. Once the episode is up, all every episode, once it gets posted, the show notes are available at twist.org. 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Tell people about twists, get them listening, get them watching on YouTube, watching on Facebook. We have so many great accounts in places where people can find us and enjoy the show and also be a part of the twist community, comment on stories, comment on the show and interact with other listeners. There's so many great places to do that. YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and twist.org. So share, share, share with your social media community, your work community, your family. Please share twists with people you think would really enjoy it. We could not do this show without you. Thank you so much for your support. I believe you believe in that plan. We disagree but I still give a damn. Your astral projections are coming along. Your chakra and she both growing less strong. Your coldness appeared after just nine short days. All thanks to the words on the whole earth displays. Now due to the juices and pills and the creams, the body's lost toxins, whatever that means. You've stopped eating all of that sinister food. Your dinner tastes awful, so it's gotta be good. Still, you put a skeptical in. I can't believe you believe in that show. We disagree but I still give a damn. The ramification of treatments from holy men leaves me slightly queasy down in the abdomen. Convents that the lies that they lead need adjusting. They drive to the bookstore and blindly start trusting. The miracles and cures all lay down in black ink. Never even bothering to stop and face. And we're back with more This Week in Science. We are and I want to thank Hotrod who's in the chat room who is currently casting us on Periscope. Thanks for sharing Twis on Periscope. That is fantastic. I've just found it and that is wonderful. Thank you so much for that. Hey Justin, you got some science stories? So it is time to rethink evolution. Not the whole thing but maybe one of the biggest pieces, one of the biggest puzzles. And according to this study, it turns out we may have invertebrates to thank for our accelerated evolution throughout this world. 385 million years ago an ancient ancestor of ours left the aquatic life for land. But the question is, the question is Ben, why? How? What makes you make this expensive evolutionary investment? This evolutionary leap. What was there on land that was so appealing? One possible reason actually was an easy meal. Invertebrates beat us to land by about 50 million years. So 50 million years of insects on land with no birds or apex predators. Nothing other than other insects to contend with for 50 million years. So the motivation was there. There's food in them that are hills. So they started working on finding a way to get ashore for longer and longer periods of time. But how did this get started? A new multi-college study suggests it was the power of the eyes that did it. Not the limbs that let our ancient aquatic ancestors to access the bug buffet. So the land is crawling with millipede centipedes. There's spiders. There's all sorts of critters that our fishy ancestors would have loved to munch on. Neuroscientist and engineer Malcolm A. Malkover of Northwestern evolutionary biologists and paleontologists Lars Schmitz of Claremont McKenna also with scripts and Pitzer colleges studied the fossil record and discovered that eyes nearly tripled in size before not after the water to land transition. The tripling coincided with the shifting location of the eyes from the side of the head to the top. Expanded visual range of seeing through the air they think may have eventually led to larger brains and early terrestrial vertebrates and the ability to plan and not merely react as fish do. The shift in vision and required planning for area endeavors preceded our morphological changes in terms of limb. Planning as well as the depth of vision likely led to our greater cognition. With limited fishy vision you need to react to things as quickly as they appear. You can't see that far underwater. With greater depth of vision you can see prey for much further away allowing longer reaction times but also requiring a series of actions to acquire the prey. The enlargement of the eyes is significant. By just popping these eyes above the waterline the fish could see 70 times farther in the air than they could in the water. With the tripling the size the animals visually monitored space increased a million fold. And this happened millions of years before terrestrial animals even existed. Quoty voice bigger eyes are almost worthless in water because vision is largely limited to what is directly in front of the animal such mitts. But larger eye size is very valuable when viewing through air. In evolution it often comes down to a trade-off. Is it worth the metabolic toll to enlarge your eyes? What's the point? Here we think the point was to search out prey on land. The massive increase in visual capability enabled by vision in air likely allowed early limbed animals to evolve more complex cognition. These animals were no longer forced to react with split second speed as was required in that water-limiting vision, water-based vision limiting situation. So also larger eyes were consequently selected for whereas the study showed in water larger eyes led to negligible increases in visual range. One animal group that arose after animals came onto the land that went back into the water full-time actually saw their eye size decrease because it was no longer necessary. Therefore, a lot of this increase in eye size was probably due to fish looking up and going, oh, look at all that food over there. Oh my gosh. That's fascinating. So fish. All of that in the evolution thanks to invertebrates on land. Thank you invertebrates. Thank you early fishes for moving your eyes for peeking out of the water and then for gaining the limbs to climb onto the water. Yes, we like it here. Thanks guys. We like it here. I love the idea too of the cognitive pressure it puts on on that situation where where now you can see 70 times further. Now you can't just snap at that thing because it's not just passing by. Now you've got to find a way to get to it. Now you've got to find a way and and then early on you've got to get there holding your breath. What does a fish do out of water? It's holding its water. I don't know what it is. All right. You have to not breathe while doing it at first. You have to really plan this thing out and that sort of planning that spark of cognitive necessity may have led to everything that's that's followed. That's kind of a chicken in the egg kind of argument. But I think it is fascinating that the the change in the visual system to accommodate the larger field of view that would lead to a larger growth of the brain and then possibly to support the larger growth of the visual system you would also have further growth of other cognitive areas that could lead to those skills like planning and everything. It's fascinating. What made it happen? I don't know. Also just to clarify there were eggs before there were chickens. I know this. I was just using it as an idiom. Eggs are much older than chickens. Very much older. I'm not even questioning. I'm not even I'm not even saying that is up for debate. Thanks. Oh my goodness. Well moving on from chickens, eggs, old fish and eyes. Well, why don't we move into how much how much information can we stuff into DNA? That's what we want to know. We've mentioned it all how what? No. So you mentioned it already. You know the size of computers has decreased. We've got smaller. We've got these computers that we call cell phones or smartphones that fit in the palm of your hand. My phone has a little card in it that's like 64 gigs of storage, right? You know, it's a massive amount of storage right in my hand. But it hasn't always been like that and modern data storage technology really hasn't been around all that long. And if we want to store data for very long periods of time and be able to read it. Some future dates say 10,000 100,000 years ago years years in the future. Not ago in the future. We want to plan ahead and say we're going to we want maybe we want to put information on another probe like Voyager and send it out into space to be there in a million years. Bleeping and booping and be picked up by aliens. You know, we want the data not to have deteriorated. And all modern data storage deteriorates over time. We do not really have a good long term data storage solution at this point in time. And additionally, I mean, I went through so many forms of storage through from when we started using computers when I was in college college, right? Big flop cassette tapes, floppy disks that were five inches wide to three and a half inches wide. And then there were things like mini disks and yes, and I still have zip disks somewhere back here in my in my files. I can't read that stuff anymore. I'm going to have to go to some antique quote unquote technology dealer to find a zip drive to be able to read the data and a computer old enough to be able to actually talk to the zip drive to be able to get the data off of it. So there are all sorts of issues with actually storing data and researchers have been working since about the early 2000s. George Church was one of the first to really dig into this idea of using DNA to store data and a few different researchers have worked on this. And last July, even there was a researcher for researchers from Microsoft who stored about 200 megabytes of data in DNA. And so this was a record for how much data was stored in DNA. But this new study that's out very this last week from a team at the New York Genome Center, Yanev Erlich and Dina Zielinski, they have used a really interesting strategy to encode data into DNA using an encoding algorithm that's used by by communications networks. So if you have noisy data communication, you need to figure out a way to get data in a quality way from place to place. So for example, stuff like BitTorrent and movies or Netflix, Amazon, they have to get a movie from their cloud servers to your computer that doesn't gap and break and have lots of errors in it. Otherwise you won't want to watch the movie, right? But that communication network is super noisy. And so an encoding algorithm has been created that's called fountain coding. And this basically creates these little tiny chunks of data, packets of data, so to speak, that get transmitted. And so the more packets you end up sending, the easier it is to reconstruct the original data. And even if you lose some of the packets, it's okay because you have enough to reconstruct it. And so they thought this could work really well for DNA. DNA, it can last for a really long time, right? So could store data from hundreds of thousands of years, right? We're currently looking at Neanderthal DNA at Mammoth DNA. There's all sorts of things we're looking at currently. So DNA can last for a really long time, but it's pretty error prone. And so you need something that's really robust to noise and error. So they're like, hey, this fountain code, it's perfect. And they put in 2.1 megabytes. They compressed this archive that had a simple movie and in a very short 52nd movie, a simple operating system, a computer virus, and also an Amazon gift card. So they had a few things. And according to an article over on The Atlantic by Ed Young, that gift card has been decoded and the money has been used by one of Erlich's Twitter followers. Aw. That's kind of fun. So anyway, they have been able, they were able to store, to encode, using this encoding algorithm. You know, it's kind of like, you need the encoding algorithm, and then you get Cypher and all that stuff. It's very fun. Like, it's kind of spy data storage. 2.1 megabytes. They stuck it in 72,000 segments of DNA with a very small amount of redundancy. And they packed it in there. They determined that after they reconstructed the archive using DNA sequencing and PCR, they were storing 215 petabytes of information per gram of DNA. And they think that this is toward the upper limit or the upper estimate of the maximum of how much you could put into DNA. So this was a really great efficiency for putting information into DNA storage. And then, you know, when you sequence DNA to read it, the DNA gets destroyed. But using PCR amplification, they were able to determine that they could do this using the fountain encoding because it's okay with errors and messiness. And so they went through nine rounds of this sequencing and DNA, PCR, and they were still able to get a quality read of the data. And they say that based on what they did in testing it, that this system possibly allows for almost infinite reads of the data. Very exciting. And currently, if you wanted to put data into DNA, you could maybe do it at about $3,500 per megabyte. But considering that when George Church was doing it, how much did he spend on it, when George Church was putting data into DNA, it was much, much more expensive, probably about $12,000 or more to be able to do the same. So the price has come down. But the amount of research that has gone into this area, as opposed to, say, cell phone technology or other kinds of technologies that have really come down in price, that really hasn't been done. So maybe with further research, the price of DNA storage will come way, way down. And we will be seeing long-term storage of data in DNA as a regular occurrence. Wild. Yeah. That is so crazy. Yeah. And then basically, oh, go ahead. Yeah, no, it's one day you'll literally have a thumb drive. A thumb. Yeah, or you'll have a plant in the corner that's encoded with some kind of data storage, you know. I was thinking the thing to do would be to use tardigrades. We like the tardigrades, yes. Because then you could, for example, send it into space, it would be fine. And it would be even safer. The DNA would be even safer in space. There we go. Especially if you dried them out and they went into their ton state, then they wouldn't even, they probably wouldn't be replicating or anything. But they'd be maybe doing a little DNA repair. Yeah. One, you're talking about how small this is. So the calculation was done by Ed Young that Erlich and Ziellinsky can fit 215,000 times as much data in a gram of DNA as a 1 terabyte currently weighs. So a 1 terabyte hard drive weighs around 150 grams. And they can get 215,000 times as much data in a single gram of DNA. And he said, he calculated you could fit all the data in the world in the back of a car. That's a lot of data. That's a lot of junk. That would be a lot of junk in my trunk. I think that was the plot to repo, man. Pretty sure. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, very, very exciting advancement for DNA storage. Tell me about time crystals. Do we have time? Yeah. So crystals from salt to diamonds, even snowflakes, they are, they have atomic structures that arrange themselves in 3D patterns that just repeat, repeat, repeat. That's how you get the crystalline structure. Scientists reporting in the journal Nature, the creation of a phase of matter dubbed a time crystal, crystal, crystal. In which atoms move in a pattern that repeats through time rather than space. That's the time crystal never settled down to what is known as thermal equilibrium, state in which they all have the same exact amount of heat. One of the first examples of a broad new class of matter called non-equilibrium phases, like these, these have been predicted. So they, they, they start out based on really Brainiac math and understanding of physics. We should be able to do this cool thing, but nobody could do it until now. This is quoting voice. This opens the door to a whole new world of non-equilibrium phases, says Andrew Potter and assistant professor of physics at the University of Texas at Austin. We've taken these theoretical ideas that we've been poking around for the last couple of years and actually built it in the laboratory. Hopefully this is just the first example of these with many more to come. And actually there was another one, University of Maryland successfully created for the first time, crystal form ions or electrically charged atoms from the element ytibrium, which is a man made mineral that we were discussing from last week is one of those. It's a crystal that they like to zap with lasers and labs. By applying just the right electrical field, the researchers levitated 10 of these ions above a surface like a magician's assistant. Next, they zap the atoms with laser pulses causing them to flip out of our heels. Then they zap them again and again in regular rhythm. That set up a pattern of flips that repeated in time. It's very interesting about this, Chris Potter notes. The pattern of atom flips repeated only half as fast as the laser pulses. This will be like pounding on a bunch of piano keys twice a second and the notes coming out only once a second. The weird quantum behavior was a signature that he and his colleagues had predicted. Confirm the result that this was indeed a time crystal. So basically it's that repeating pattern that they stimulated. And would this happen naturally? It seems like, okay, we made this thing in a lab and we zapped it with the lasers and artificially created minerals. Yeah, artificially created minerals and lasers and zap it at a particular beat. Is it free jazz? It's a new phase of matter. What they do with it, who knows? Right, but it might like there's like, you know, it's always a throw. Oh, we're dealing with something quantum. So it could have something to do with quantum computing at some point. So far, it's just really cool. They created a dime crystal. I wonder, you know, something like this, you know, that has to be stimulated where, you know, we in the chat room, we're making jokes about Dr. Who and there's also, you know, this, the idea of, okay, is something like this going to give us, is this going to lead to the technology that will give us some kind of time travel ability? I mean, what, it's a new form of matter, but is it really, I mean... Not any form, a new phase of matter, but yeah. I mean, your creative patterns in time that aren't there in space. Like, what does that even mean? Right? Nothing to you and I. Somebody who's like, oh, there's only a way to make a pattern through time, but not in space, then I could complete my whatever crazy time machine TARDIS space warping technology. Like, yeah, I mean, we're inventing stuff like we invented the wheel just now, right? With this. This could be like the invention of the wheel, which people used to make pottery in thousands of years before anybody stuck it on a cart. Like, you never really understand. And, you know, dung beetles rode around all day on something very much like a wheel. Yeah. So the same, and this seems really similar. There's, or not similar, but in a different vein, this kind of a form or a phase of matter. So we've got crystals that are symmetrical and they line up very specifically. And then I was just reading about a researcher today who her work on emergent properties, she actually figured out how to how to create a crystal that is infinitely unsymmetric. So actually kind of broke the idea of crystals. And so I don't know. Maybe this is also that that just a fun idea of when you're thinking about, okay, matter is in three dimensions, but then time is in the fourth. And we deal with the matter all the time. But what about the time? Can we can we change the time? Can we make it? Can we make it flux? Is it going to be a flux capacitor? Yeah. There's a whole, we're still, we're still really like, either there isn't anything else cool that we can do with science. And tomorrow we find out we got to the end of the internet. It's all done, right? Or there's the possibility that everything, like if you look, you don't have to look back. If we can think of it, we can probably do it. Yeah. And that's the thing. You don't have to look too far back in science. And everybody thinks that they're at the highest point that science will ever be at. And it's the most that we can ever do with the technologies that we've been covered and with the physics that we understand. Like this is it, 1910. This is the epitome of everything that can be done through science. And then as time progresses and we find, even things that we thought might not have been useful, but we're just interesting become now the cornerstones of a brand new technology. I think that we have no idea what's coming still. And as long as we can keep the science going, we're going to keep finding out more clues about what science will uncover that next big leap or two ahead. Yeah. It seems like we can do everything except for maybe the flying car. But that's also because it's just a bad idea. It's just impractical. Yeah, that's just not a good idea. There actually have been flying cars. They're just not that great. Yeah, that's not a good idea to begin with. Because we have things called planes, so it's fine. And now we have drones. Yeah. And I'm looking at another article that's over on Gizmodo about the time crystals. And they're saying the researchers are bringing up quantum computing applications in the far future because of the possibility of being able to control lots of quantum bits at the same time. But the writer says the importance of this is probably very just pretty fundamental. Normally phases of matter exist only by changing the way particles arrange in space. Time crystals open up a whole world of possible new phases of matter by adding these laser energy pulses. Phases that only exist when you're doing something to the solid, like a quantum physics version of how cornstarch mixed with water only feels solid when you smack it. I love that analogy. That's fantastic. But to this point, though, the story you had just did previously where they said, this is the most information you can fit into space through the DNA. This is it. This is the top amount of information that fits within the gram. And then they go, oh, yeah, for any given moment. But what if we created a dozen moments within that gram? And now you've just done a tenfold increase. Every limit is just a challenge for the next generation. And I love that this is a study or an experiment that came out of somebody. Somebody was like, I have an idea and then wrote up a paper about it and didn't actually do it themselves. We're like, this sounds great. And then a bunch of researchers were like, yeah, let's do it. This might get happen. I love that. All right. Well, moving on from time crystals, I want to bring you to back to yourself. Let's come back into ourselves out of time and back into the space that we exist in in our bodies. Your bones, we're going to go right into your bones. Did you know that your bones help regulate your appetite? No. Yeah. This is so neat. This is a new study. I mean, we know for a little while now that bones are something of basically an endocrine organ where the bones are an organ. They don't just, I mean, they don't just hold your body up. They're not just structure. They also, I mean, they're huge in like cholesterol metabolism and lots of cholesterol, is integrated into things like estrogen and testosterone. Bones are also important for creating red blood cells and lots of other things. We're finding out about all sorts of things, new research published by some female scientists. Her name is Stavrula Custeni of Columbia University in New York City. She has found that there is a compound that is called lipokalintu or LCN2. And this had previously been found in the blood, it had been found in fat cells and like it kind of made sense. People are like, oh, lipokalintu involved maybe with appetite, but it wasn't really highly concentrated in fat cells. And so people didn't really think much about it. Well, Custeni and her colleagues, they found that it is, has 10 times higher a concentration in the osteoblasts in your bone. So your bone cells, osteoblasts. And then they found that when they generated mice, so they did a knockout, mice get rid of that gene that creates LCN2. The levels of the hormone dropped two thirds in these mice that they had knocked out. And then the mice went on that had this lowered LCN2 in their blood. They ate more and they gained weight and fat mass. So they started depositing fat, gained weight, ate more, had no control over how much they ate. When they injected it, this protein into regular mice or mice that were already obese, didn't matter. The rodents curbed their, their hunger. They stopped eating so much. And the animals then started to lose weight. Right? They found these injections also increased insulin levels and glucose tolerance. Have a new fat diet. Get one of these protein injections. There you go. I know, right? So then they were like, all right, so LCN2 obviously is really involved in metabolism and the insulin and glucose metabolism pathways. So how crazy that it's coming from the bone instead of from the fat cells. But all right, how does it, if it is an endocrine hormone and affecting appetite, it's probably doing something in the brain. Does it actually have receptors in the brain? And so they took this stuff and they injected into the hypothalamus. And they found that LCN2 activated these cells that expressed a particular receptor protein. And those mice changed their eating habits. But in mice that had that receptor protein taken out, no change in anything. So this is more evidence that it goes to the hypothalamus and it binds to and activates this particular receptor. And so it's crossing the blood brain barrier, which is very interesting and potentially important if we would be giving it to people therapeutically as a, you know, as for people potentially with type two diabetes, which they found individuals that had type two diabetes and had their body weight was inversely linked to serum levels of this LCN2. So higher body weight, lower levels of the protein, just like the mice that they had looked at. And then they also found that there were some of these patients that had the hypothalamic receptor had mutations in it. And they actually had higher levels of this LCN circulating in their body. But they still were a little heavy because it wasn't communicating. Yeah. So there's a bunch more research to take place here. But this is a really interesting finding. And the story of our bones grows ever more interesting. I mean, we've been focusing on the fat brain connection for controlling diabetes and weight gain and metabolic disorders. But maybe we should also be looking at our bones. It sort of reminds me of how we're like always talking about how we've underestimated the intelligence of animals. It's like our own brain is like, no, I'm literally the brain. I'm connected to everything that's going on in your body all the time. I am more, your brain is more intelligent than you give it credit for. I do more things. There's a reason I'm the brain. I'm connected to everything that happens. Nothing goes on without me. I also think about how we have these systems of organs and we talk about how they're all related and they all work together and our entire body is a system. And oh yeah, and there are bones. I know that your bones hold you up. They make your blood and they hold you up. They're structural support moving on. And then no, turns out your body is a system. Yeah, a complete system and related. Yeah. And I looked at some other studies that from a couple of years back looking at LCN2 in bones and there is also a likelihood of, if LCN2 is low, bone density is more likely to be lower. So there's bone deposition also. So insulin and glucose and bone deposition. And so there's also, it's a system, man. It's a big, crazy system. It's all connected. Man, that's right. It really is. There's like ligaments and blood vessels, the lymph. Okay, is it time for nightmare juice? Yes. Oh, let's talk about spiders. So many, so many, so many spiders. So this is the study from the University of British Columbia and Latisha Aviles. She's the professor of zoology there. And she studied cobweb spiders, cobweb spiders. They're in the group Anelocemus. And so a famous cobweb spider, for example, is the black widow. But the spiders that she studied were in Ecuador. And she was looking at how at some elevations, they live in small colonies, one or two families. And then in the lower down, in the rainforest, they had colonies of hundreds, two thousands. So why did some spiders live in tight knit, tiny groups? And some spiders live in giant groups, even though they were the same species. And so they took some, some living single family groups from the higher elevation, brought them down to the rainforest. And then they measured predators and rainfall. They protected some groups from predators, and they protected some from rainfall and damage from their webs. And they found that environmental conditions were the ones, those two environmental conditions were forcing spiders to form larger colonies. So they're actually helping each other. They were building stronger webs with more silk. And then also when the webs got damaged, they, some spiders would either protect their offspring from predators, fix webs. And then somebody else would do the opposite. So they would essentially be able to leave their kids with some, with an aunt or an uncle over there while they went and fixed the web, or the, and the uncle would go fight off the ants. A-N-T, not A-U-N-T. Well, the parents would stay with their babies. So the tough conditions allow, kind of forced these spiders to live in these huge nightmarish, nightmarish colonies of thousands of spiders. Thousands of spiders. So they're just doing it to help each other out. Cool. Thousands of spiders living together. They're just trying to deal with the harsh terrain, man. The harsh. Cut them a break. Weather. And don't walk into the webs. No, don't walk into the webs. Yeah, I mean, pretty much every spider, other than those that are crevice spiders, these are spiders that just, they would spin webs, right? Yeah, yeah. But these are pretty thick webs. So these spiders, because of where they live, a single web for a single spider is not going to cut it. Even the ones that are at higher elevations are living in small family groups so they can make a thicker, stronger, mesher sort of web structure. It's not the standard circle web. Wow. And they find support in their communities. Spiders, we find out more and more about these creatures. Yeah, you, you go spider communities, band together, save your babies. You can do whatever you want. No, not near my house. You can't unless you're just a cool garden spider. Then go ahead, make your web outside. That's great. Or if you're a little house spider, that's fine. Cracks and crevices, that's for you. Take it. If you're a Black Widow or another cobweb spider. Get out. You should be not seen nor heard. You can live in my wood pile as long as you never go anywhere near me. No, not in my wood pile, because I want to go near my wood pile and then I don't want to bring Black Widows into the house and then like hear them going. Oh, you'll never see them. When you like put on fire. Oh my goodness. If no one's here to hear it, when you burn a spider, does it make a sound? Black widows, I think, are the most beautiful of all spiders, though. They are gorgeous. They are very pretty. Beautiful and menacing looking. And they don't come attacking you either. They don't want to come running after you or chasing. They don't jump on those beautiful slender Black ladies. They actually can jump pretty good. But they don't, yeah, they don't run you down. They're not hunting you. They're hunting something else. You'll be fine. Yeah. And, you know, when it comes to people, seems like they're hunting something other than sex these days. Pretty tough. A study. I'm switching to my story. There was a segue there, but I somehow missed it. A researcher named Jean Twenge, who's a psychologist at San Diego State University, looked at data from the General Social Survey, which involves a national sample of Americans over 18 years old. Surveyed most years between 1972 and 2014. This study involved responses from 26,620 Americans and focused on how often they were having sex. Published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, American adults are having a lot less sex. Now, yeah. So in the early 2010s, there aren't American adults are having, are romping nine fewer times a year than they did in the 90s, just 20 years prior. We had better drugs. This drop was from an average of about 62 times a year between 95 and 2000 to 53 times a year between 2010 and 2014. And this was across basically everything. And they link this to people not, people not getting married. That was going to be one of my questions. And also married people having just less sex. You know why? Technology. That's what they bring up in, that's what the... Do you want to do it or do you want to watch some Netflix? And if you've got something else to do, you know, maybe you're just not interested. Yeah. So... They fall asleep binge watching a new show and then they just don't get around to it. Yeah. So everybody, everybody's having less... People without steady partners though, they rose from 26% of the survey to 33% in 2014. So people getting married or just having partnerships where they're steady, going steady, there are more people... There are more people not doing that for sure. There are more people single. More people single, 33% now compared to 26% or at least 33% in 2014. And the people most or least likely I guess to be having sex are those with a college degree and people living in the South. Parents of kids older than six also are doing it less. People in the South, that's interesting. Yeah. And people who skip pornographic movies are also having less sex. Who skip them? Yeah. Don't... People who don't watch pornographic movies. This is just... I would think it would be the other way. Yeah. Interesting. But they think increased work hours, increased interest in porn. So those who are... I don't know. And other factors might be declines in happiness, increases in depression, and the availability of technology. What about fitness? They didn't bring that up specifically. I wonder if we're just eating like crap and we're tired all the time. That's probably also... But that's also going to affect your happiness, depression. That's true, that's true. It's definitely all interrelated. But I think that's definitely, that could be part of it too. I still think we had better drugs, better music. Oh, the 90s. You know, the dream of the 90s is alive in Portland. Yes, that's true. 1890s. 1890s, exactly. My final story, I want to take us out on a very positive note for women. There is a new fellowship called the D-Brook, the Brook Owens Fellowship, in which women are given paid internships to work at aerospace corporations or organizations. This year, on Wednesday, this is less than a year after Brook Owens died of terminal cancer. But her friend, who was the former deputy NASA administrator, Lori Garver, was very struck by her friend Owens's death and contacted a lot of people she knew and said, hey, isn't there something we could do to mentor young women interested in getting into the aerospace industry? And it turned into this fellowship program in which they have given the first class of fellows, 36 women, fellowships for the summer, and a future of networking and hopefully bright aerospace careers ahead of them. And this is, have either of you seen Hidden Figures? Yeah, so women at NASA of all backgrounds, I mean, it's not just NASA, it's the aerospace industry in general. Women could be there more. There are not many women in the industry and there's not a lot of women in general in the pipeline, just not highly represented. And so hopefully something like this will bring more experienced women, because this will give women great experience at jobs in the aerospace industry, bring them into the field to excel. Yeah. And if you have not seen Hidden Figures, please go see it. It was amazing. I kind of want to watch it every day. I do too. Oh my goodness. Yeah, that movie was amazing. I mean, I did not watch all the movies that were up for Oscars this year, but I would say it was deserving of every one of its awards and it should have won Best Movie. I loved it. I thought it was the story, everything, and all the women who were so pivotal in getting the Apollo mission to space. I mean, that's just amazing. Yeah. Hidden Figures, they were. They were. Nobody knew their story. And now the world does, which is brilliant. More such stories need to be told. Which is why we're here, right? Which is why we are here. I am so thankful that I could spend International Women's Day with both of you and that we could discuss science, because ultimately, this is perfect. This show has allowed me to feel like I have a voice, to see myself in science, to be able to discuss these things in a way that I hadn't before. And it's also inspired, I think, many of my friends to think about things in a way that maybe they haven't before. And to have such a strong leader who is also a woman is such an important part of this as well. Thank you guys so much for tuning in and thank you both of you for being my role models and my colleagues and my co-host. Thank you, Claire. I'm so glad that you're a part of the show now. It's fantastic. And Justin, thank you. I feel a little left out. It's okay. It's Women's Day. It's fine. It's okay. You don't have to, like, Yes. Every other day is Man's Day. We've got 360 more other days. 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And all it'll cost you is a couple of grand. This week science is coming your way. So everybody listen to what I say. I use the scientific method and I'll broadcast my opinion all over. It's this week in science. This week in science. This week in science. Science. Science. This week in science. This week in science. This week in science. Science. 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 better understand that 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 Toxoplasma Gondii. Ay, ay, ay, ay, ay, ay, ay. Cause it's this week in science. This week in science. This week in science. Science. Science. This week in science. This week in science. This week in science. Science. Science. I've got a laundry list of items I want to address from stopping global hunger to dredging Loch Ness. I'm trying to promote more rational thought and I'll try to answer any question you've got. But how can I ever see the changes I seek when I can only set up shop one hour a week? This week in science is coming your way. You better just listen to what we say and if you learn anything from the words that we've said then please just remember this week in science. This week in science. This week in science. Science. Science. This week in science. Science. Science. This week in science. This week in science. Week in science. This week in science. I didn't mean to turn it off that fast. Let's see. Let's see. That's okay. I'll just add it on there at the end when I edit the podcast. This is this week in feeding the guinea pigs. They do love cilantro. Hi Tracy. I'm crystals. Oh my goodness. I want to make time crystals. I just need to get my hands on some terbium. Disturbium. Tracy, you're so loud today. Like a little jumping guinea pig. They're so excited about that. They're like, give us more. Look at that. Your penza. This is seriously, it's like whack-a-mole, but You would never whack. No, you just give them give them cilantro. They go up and down. Up and down. Laantro. And that's the laantro. Okay. There comes a little guinea pig head. He's going to jump right out of there. Charlotte Boo. Charlotte Boo is shy. Oh, there's Sharpenza again. Where's your mom? Sharpenza. I love their names. Yes. Sharpenza. They're the greatest of all. Charlotte Boo. The least you know. I know. What's Tracy's full name? Tracy Smurkin. Tracy Smurkin. That's right. And yes, I do believe it has to do with the fact that she looks like. Yep. There's mom. Here we go. The mama that they didn't know. She will stick her head out. Yeah. But what was it? They got the mom with a girl. They got the mom as a baby. Didn't know she was pregnant. She was a pregnant baby. She was found in Dolores Park, which is one of the last name. And this one's last name is Park. Charlotte Boo Park and Sharpenza Park. Because they were found in the park. That makes sense. Tracy, you have cilantro on your head. Guinea pigs. I love that the guinea pigs are popping up. Still no Justin popping up, but these guinea pigs, wow, they don't realize that we're here watching them. Otherwise, they would never be doing this. Human, you're just sitting here to feed us, right? Yeah. That's a situation. Well, usually they're pretty shy with strangers, too. They know Blair. Space guinea pigs. Panoramics in the audience. Hi, Pam. Hola. Chelsea looks like she's getting so big. Seeing those pictures lately. You guys are so cute. Thanks, DicTel. Glad you enjoyed the show. Go find out about time crystals for us. Or maybe time hamsters. Time hamsters. Rover, how dare you? These are not hamsters. These are not hamsters. Those are guinea pigs. Hamsters are triples born pregnant. Up to your hip. Oh, my goodness. She's a big girl, but still. Look at that little tractor. The baby gets bigger. Yeah. I love watching them eat. You know what is it? Is it what country? Is it Peru? Where they eat guinea pigs? Yes. What? Where are they from originally? Is it Peru? I can never remember. I thought it was India. Back now. Actually, they're from the wild planes of the Americas. There was a time when herds of guinea pigs by the tens of thousands wild. The Andes. In the distance, you hear the rumble. You see the dust rising from the horizon. I love their little calls. They're so cute. And then the massive herd of guinea pigs would stampede and munch everything in their path. It was a sad day when the guinea pigs came through and destroyed a farm. They would descend like locusts on the center of that. I love mom. Would you like a raspberry? There we go. So wild, let's see, guinea pigs were first domesticated as long ago as 2000 BC in the Andes in South America, the region now known as Peru and Bolivia. Yeah. In the wild, in South America, they live in rocky areas, grasslands, and forest edges in groups of about 10 adults. They live in burrows that are either dug by themselves or by other animals. They are most active at night. Oh, which is why they're so moving. They're so crazy right now. And that's when they come out and forage on a wide variety of plant materials. So this really is feeding time for them. They're very excited. The guinea pig was originally kept for food, but some may have become family pets for kids. They're a pretty good pet, I have to say. Yeah, they were cleaning up lots of poop and pee. This is so interesting. Guinea pigs were not often bought, rather they were given as presents, especially as wedding gifts or as gifts to special guests or children. They would be kept in the household kitchen where they would be allowed to run freely. And then the guinea pig also played the role of the evil spirit collector in traditional healing rituals. In Andean medicine, the guinea pig was rubbed over the body of a sick patient. And when it started squeaking, they believed it had identified the affected area. Black guinea pigs. Put me down, put me down. You know, black guinea pigs were especially holy, as in the wild black is the rarest color. And most wild guinea pigs are brown or gray. Wow. And then in the 1700s, the Dutch and English took guinea pigs from South America to Europe where they became aristocratic pets. I love those little guinea pig heads that keep popping up. They keep popping up behind player. They're like, hey, hey. Oh my gosh. What is that? This is Tracy Smurkin. Tracy Smurkin. Oh my goodness. Hello. Her hair is amazing. That's crazy. I would think that's fake. I would not believe that's a real guinea pig. Good night, Fada. I'd seen it on the interwebs. You're not going to make any sounds? No sounds? Maybe a couple? No? Omelette. Don't get to fight. That's a cute little guinea pig. I promise. Here's cilantro. Here's cilantro. There you go. Yeah. Strength says they were originally called popcorn pig roasts. Yeah. Lots of food, animals. I guess they become pets when you're not starving. There's plenty of food and you have the luxury of thinking that things are cute. Yeah. Yeah. I don't have to kill you to survive. I'll name you Tracy. Yes. Your name is Tracy. Yeah. Guinea, guinea pigs. Maybe the guinea pigs stopped in Guinea on the way from South America to Europe and the story got changed. Who knows? You know, that one does look like, Tracy does look like a little bit like a mop. She's not a mop though. She's very cute. Her hair is amazing. Oh my goodness. She has the best stylists. I wanted to shake the baby, but she's like, nah. Here's the shy one, right? No, the mom's the really shy one. The baby is the one whose face you've seen all night. Popping up there. Okay. So guinea pig sounds. Jenisky wants to know if we could under, you know, what if we could understand? Well, let's see if I can do it. You're pretty well said. You guys hear that? Uh-huh. Yeah. It's normally associated with hunger or a desire to eat. Don't break things. And weaking is something that is exclusively directed to humans. The scientists have never heard those sounds made in the wild. Weaking was learned through domestication. Guinea pigs also purr. They don't purr like a cat though. It's a hybrid of the grumble of a dog and the low purr of a cat. And it can only, this sound can only be made by the throat of a guinea pig. And it's usually associated with being content or happy and is usually made when you're gently petting your pig. But if they're startled and feel threatened, they vocalize the same noise in short spurts. And then they have a rumble, which is similar to the purr except with a vibrating effect lower pitch. And the male uses a sound to woo the female to mate. When he makes the noise, he'll start to wiggle his hips, walk around the female. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Given his rumble strut. Rumble strut. Yeah. Rumble, rumble, will. Rumble strut. And then if the male isn't trying to romance the female, the female might rumble to the male to signal that she would be receptive. Hey, get the wooing. Exactly. Get the wooing boy. And then. Oh, I want to show you the baby. Oh, you've got the baby with his little red eyes. You've got the little red eyes. I know. It's terrible. I'm so sorry. I'm the worst. I know. Guinea pigs also growl. And it's a distressed sound. They don't like change and they'll start growling. Or they also teeth chatter. And if they teeth chatter, it means they're angry, unhappy, or agitated. Look, she has floppy ears. It's like my favorite thing about her are cute floppies. Look at her cute floppy ears. He's asking if Kai wants a pet. Yeah, he wants a scorpion. He has two cats. He has two cats, which is plenty, but now he wants a scorpion. Because his friend Ada has a scorpion and he really likes Ada's scorpion. And he's like, Ada says her scorpion is really cute. I want a scorpion too, mommy. Like, okay, a scorpion. That's awesome. That would be an easy one to take care of. You just put them in a glass cage and never open. Might be the multi-clean. Yeah, I think you don't have to clean it, but once a year. Really? I don't know. I'm making that up. Yeah, I was going to say. I don't think I would be cleaning it. I'd be like, scorpion, you go now. Go with your red cage clean itself. There you go. It is away from me. All right, Chris. I got to go. Yeah. Good night. Blair, Kiki. You doing well? Amazing, great show. It was good. Do you have family in the house again? No, no, I don't. I'm making art things. Oh, cool. We like you making art things. That's great. Oh. Horses. Horses. This is actually a fun story. This horse is the first, what do you call, where they did a sequential photography of a horse running. Because in art, they a lot of times would show horses with their feet off the ground outstretched as they were galloping quickly. And somebody made a bat to Leland Stanford, a railroad mogul here in California. Or he made the bet that they actually at some point did have their feet off the ground where somebody else was saying they didn't. So we hired this photographer. And it turns out there is no outstretched pose where the horse has all of its feet off the ground. It doesn't actually happen. However, the horse does at some point pull its legs up off the ground underneath. See, is that right? Yep. Yep. So, yeah, here's right. At some point, all four legs are off the ground. It's just flying, hovering there. But it's with the legs tucked underneath, not outstretched. And so you're doing art with that, making artings. Yeah, I have hundreds of these now. That's incorporated into a thing. Cool. That's very cool. Can't wait to see it. Finished product. It's going to be in your art show. Justin's going to do an art show. It's going to be awesome. That's right, Hot Rod. 17 frames per second. 24 frames per second. It's 24 frames per second. And actually this was, I believe, 24 frames per second too, which became the basis for film. Yep. It was, you know, you went from this to Zoetropes to... I love Zoetropes. Those are fun. Yes, Edward of Moebridge. And he also had like 14 other ways of saying his name. It was like, I think the first one was like Muggerridge. He kept changing his last name. He just didn't like, he was never happy with it. That's funny. Things you learn on a science show. He also murdered his wife's lover. It was somebody in the military. But he was found not guilty. He went for like an insanity plea. But they were like, no, it doesn't matter. That was not right. They shouldn't have been, you know. They called it justified. Justified, right? And then she like left him. Well, you know. Oh, I wonder what. No, I don't think I want to hang out with you anymore. Ended badly anyway. You can kind of go, yeah. Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness. Oh my god. Do you have any pictures if I'm not mistaken? I know that 24 frames per second is what the film industry uses. Although, if you get into like high definition video, it's like 30 something. Well, you want to hit the Flickr fusion frequency. Oh, that's the name of the piece of Flickr. The name of this piece is called Flickr. I'm incorporating a little bit of an optical illusion that creates a flickering dot effect that's not actually there. So it kind of will look like there's flickering motion taking place on the painting, which is just an optical illusion. And then these are in there to finish the overarching attempt to jam concepts into one piece. What's the meaning of this? I try to jam a lot of stuff into one thing. Let's put it all in there. That's the meaning behind it. Get it all in. I like things. I'm going to put them in there. I'll show you what the rest of the thing is. I don't have quite the Flickr effect happening perfectly yet. Sort of happening, but it needs a little bit of, it needs these in there. I think these might do it. Well, he's going to move things around. Justin uses trip wires. So I don't know. You probably can't see the flickering dot. I actually showing up almost too well on this film. Is it white lines? Is that what you're trying to say? It's white lines, but there's, but you're probably seeing some black dots in the intersections. I'm seeing whiter dots in the white dots. Okay. So it's not quite. It depends on where I'm looking. Yeah. Yeah. And then these individual little horses will be like in these frames. So cool. Is that paint or metal? It's paint. Cool. Solid crocs. Nice. I like it. You made an art. Made an art thing. I like the creative people. It's great. We've already marched. I have to decide if we're going to do a calendar again. I know. We can chat about it. I'm a little overwhelmed by the fact that it's already marched. I was like, I have plenty of time to decide. Oh, we're a quarter through the year already? Cool. Yeah. Dick Till's saying he could see black dots at the edge of his field of view. That's kind of what I was saying. White dots in the center and black dots more towards the edge. Greater, greater black. It's cool. I like it. That's awesome. All right. Thanks for sharing your art. Yeah, which is what I'm going to go retired to. So good night, y'all. See you next week. That's a great thing to go retire to. See you next week, Justin. Yeah. I don't know what else. It was a decent day. We made it through. We made it through. You've had some guinea pigs. We had a good show. We talked some cool female science, women in science. I have discovered from Richard Quintanilla. Who is in Peru? He says, yes, they are very, the guinea pigs are a very popular dish here in Peru. Not, oh, not the same rodent. Oh, there's a, oh, they call them Cuyas. Cuyas. Cuyas. Popular dish in Peru, not the same rodent as the guinea pig. Cuyas are also used by shamans to extract these diseases out of six people. I don't know if it's like a Kavi or something. They said there's also another giant, he says there's also a giant rodent. Ronsoco is also eaten by, Happy Barra probably, yeah, eaten by Amazonian tribes. Fascinating. Oh, the things that people eat. Did you see the video? What was it last week? There's a video of Angelina Jolie in, I don't know which country she was in. I don't remember that exactly, but basically cooking insects and eating insects with local people in the area where... I didn't see it, but that's awesome. Yeah, and she was very into it. She's like, yep, you travel out here and this is what the food is and you just have to eat it. And so she was like, yeah, these are really good. They're kind of taste like this. These ones taste like this. She's telling the video, the person and the reporter, Oh, you know, this one's a little bit for more, a little bit more advanced palates. You don't really need to try that one yet. It's pretty funny. It's the, it's the livestock of tomorrow. I know. It's going to, I mean, seriously, unless, you know, unless we can come up with, maybe it'll be both stem cell burgers, you know. Yeah, 3D printed food. 3D printed food, insect burgers, stem cell burgers, you know, there's all that stuff. You have to get our protein somehow. I mean, I guess we already enough insects in our diet. That's true. We could also just eat more plants and less meats. We could just eat more plants. I have to say it's funny though. I mean, I was vegetarian for so long and I was totally fine. And there's something that shifted in, in how I feel about how hungry I am. And if I eat like a meal that's like rice and veggies, maybe with tofu, I get hungry more quickly. I digest it faster. I get hungry more quickly. And I feel like I'm always like on the hunt for more food. If I try, you know, I'm like, I'm going to try and, you know, not eat chicken at this meal. I'm going to eat, you know, I'm going to not do meat for a day. I'm like, I feel like those days I am just like, I need food. Carry nuts, carry nuts with you on that day. Yeah, that's what I've discovered is when I have been on my crazy health kicks and I've like eaten no processed food, like no carbs, no sugars, right? I have to snack all day. Yeah. Oh, I couldn't do it without carbs. Oh my gosh. But I have to snack, but I like snack all day, but it's still less calories in the end. Yeah. And it's still healthier. And it's like all sorts of positive benefits, but it's just carbs are so delicious. I just can't. So delicious. I can't stop with the carbs. Just have good carbs. Brown rice, it's all nutty and yummy. Or you have, you know, like a good loaf of multi-green bread. It's like all yummy. You have like a yummy pasta, yummy. I'm going to eat less white food. Definitely. Yeah. I mean, you can, I can do without the white food. I mean, I, I don't, I don't know though. I mean, I am slowly picking away at the chocolate birthday cake from Kai's birthday this weekend. That's still in the front. Oh yeah. That was this weekend. How did it go? It was great. How many kids did you have at your house? We did not do it at my house. We did it at the park. Oh, good, good, good, good, good. So it was great. Yes. How many kids did that? I ate guinea pig and I don't eat meat meat. I only eat chicken and fish. That's good. It's not real meat. Your blood's going to be so happy about that. Not guinea pigs, but the party this weekend, Kai's sixth birthday party. We were in at the park because he wanted to invite his entire class and I said, yeah, that's not happening at my house. So we went to the park and it was probably like 40 degrees and it rained and it was, we had a covered picnic area but it was so cold. It was so cold. The kids had a blast. Oh, good. We set up like a, kind of like an Easter egg hunt. But instead of Easter eggs, it was pictures of Pokemon all around. The kids had got, kids got a little package of poke, pokeballs and a little Velcro strap to stick it on and then they go around and they had to find the Pokemon and throw the pokeballs at them, catch their Pokemon and check them off their, their poke decks. We made them a little paper poke decks with pictures of all the Pokemon they're supposed to find and the kids ran around and loved it. Yeah. That's great. It's cute. Yeah. It was super cute. Right. Hot red. Okay. I had a great time. Yeah. Kids are sticky, noisy, smelly and want to touch all your stuff. It's true. That's entirely accurate. So having the party at the park was one of my most brilliant ideas ever. You know, subtract from that the fact that it's like March in Portland. So yeah, but everybody was like, yeah, we're doing this like Portlanders. We're out in the rain. All the kids came with their raincoats and everyone had a great time. Oh my gosh, Pam, kids birthday parties are so exhausting. Kids birthday parties. But what you do in the future, you still can have parties. What you do is you outsource it. You don't have it at your house. Do something like have it at a park or you go someplace like a play space that has party packages. So all you have to do is write a check and give them the money and the cake. Write a check. Yeah. And it's done and you don't have to deal with anything. Yeah. Yeah. That's the other way to do it. Or you have like a very, very, very small family affair. Yes. Or only like a couple of kids. And you do like a really small like five person sleepover or something. But that gets hard to do. But yeah. Ed, are you doing a, uh, doing a science island hangout on Sunday? Pam, Ramac, you're funny. You house it. Yes. The animals look after you have animals to look after. And the animals look after the children. Yeah. I don't think the guinea pigs would be very good at that. No. Earlier in the feed, Pam said that she had, um, house sat once and there, let me see if I can find it. There were guinea pigs. And then the cat and the dog watched the guinea pigs and, uh, who had free range of the house and the yard and protected them from out other outside interloping cats and dogs. That's so sweet. It's adorable. The guinea pigs were part of the family. Very cute. Wow. Your kid has a lot of energy. Why am I not surprised, Pam? What is it? The, the limb doesn't fall far from the tree. That, yeah. Yeah. The branch. Yes. Did you just place the little baby, Ed? It's not very nice. So Sunday science island hangout. That's cool. Anyone who's interested in that can find Ed's announcements over on Facebook or also you can go to scienceisland.org and the science island. Excuse me. I think I'm tired. I'm tired. Made me on two. Yeah. You can go check out the science island hangout on Sundays. Island work. Is that where it goes? Yep. And there's a link right there. Chat and Google plus hangout. And yep, scienceisland.org. Look at all this cool stuff that's there. I always forget the suffixes for things. Everybody yawning. I know I'm sorry I got you yawning. You know, there was something I read this week about a researcher doing like a review of yawning research and maybe calling into question whether or not yawning is actually contagious, but I don't think so. But basically I don't think he what he got at with to I don't know summer to summarize long story short. He was questioning the field of research into yawning contagiousness. And I think basically he realized it is contagious, but he doesn't know whether it's innately contagious or if it's something that we learn. So whether you learn to yawn from other people and then you and then once you learn it. I don't know. I'm pretty sure I've made an animal yawn before. Right. Yeah. Talk about yawning is making us jump. I know that's what I just did. And when I was reading the article, I started yawning uncontrollably. I read this whole article about yawning science. Yeah. The whole time. I'm like. They're really all the whole time. I couldn't stop yawning. It was pretty funny. Oh my goodness. Oh Pam, that's funny. A toddler treadmill for Chelsea. That's cute. You could get her also my friend whose son has a lot of energy. They got him a little a little trampoline. Not like a big outdoor one, but a little trampoline that you use like in the house that you know some people do aerobics and stuff on them. But he just goes over and bounces on the trampoline whenever he wants to. It's great. Wow. You can't yawn properly. I feel really bad for you. It must be very unsatisfying to not be able to have a complete yawn. Right. Dictal replication crisis. Can you get one turtle to make another yawn? I don't know. Turtles. I don't know if you already have a trampoline on. I know. Do reptiles yawn? Now that is the question. I got to find that article. It was pretty cool. I kind of think about reptiles and yawning. I don't know if they do. I've seen... I don't know. It's as sniffly again. It's better than it was. Here it is. So the thing here I'm going to yawn because there's a picture of a guy yawning at the top of this article. Talking about yawning is funny. Yeah, the article is titled Another Replication Crisis Yawn. Aristotle believed it. Scientists proved it. A new study hints the decades worth of research on contagious yawning might be bogus. Now that's where it goes. Where the people writing the article headline just go a little bit too far. Because I honestly from the article, you guys can read it and yawn yourselves. But I honestly don't think this guy's research calls the entire field of research into question. But there definitely is the question of is it just something we notice that people or animals yawn more? Do we notice the yawning more after we've yawned? Would we notice a yawn if we hadn't already yawned? So there are kind of confirmation biases that might be present in our thinking. It's good to approach things like yawning and contagiousness of yawning. Thanks a lot Blair. You're doing it. You said the word yawn like 50 times. You can't do it. Oh my god. It's good to approach these things scientifically. Oh my god. I love this. I know. Oh I'm so glad that is cracking me up. Yawning is cracking me up. All right on this yawning note. It's bedtime. Bedtime. Pam and her energy and her energetic child. It's morning for them right now. They're up. They're out. Child is bouncing on the trampoline wildly. I am going to go yawn. I put myself to slumber. That's what I like to do. I love to sleep these days. It's winter and we haven't gotten yet to spring. We haven't had the daylight savings time which is going to make me so tired. Even more tired than I am right now. It's afternoon. It's afternoon. Still that crazy afternoon energy. Child bouncing on the trampoline. I know what things are happening. I'll write you guys. Oh you found that Guardian article. Improbable tortoise. How fun go is that? 2011. Maybe I'll read this article about tortoise yawns. As I go to bed. Guys, thanks so much for joining us for another show. I had a lot of fun tonight. I hope you did too. Remember, science is the new rock and roll. Yeah. I'm glad you guys check it out with us every week. Rock on. Science on. That's right. Rock out there Blair. Thanks for a great show Blair. Thank you. So excited to spend my International Women's Day with you. And we are International Women. Yeah, we are. Yeah. Of science. All right. Have a really great week. Everyone out there have a great week. And we will see you next Wednesday. Take care.